American broadcaster CNN has initiated a legal action against Perplexity AI, joining its contemporaries like The New York Times in dragging AI firms to the courts. CNN has alleged that Perplexity has been exploiting its content and distributing the network’s intellectual property in an unauthorized way to the users of its AI chatbot.
CNN has zeroed in on its stance that AI companies make enough profits to pay for high-quality news that is reported by humans, frequently amid unfavourable and dangerous situations.
“CNN’s lawsuit stands for the proposition that Perplexity, a company valued at tens of billions of dollars, should not be able to steal from entities that create the original content Perplexity exploits,” said the New York City-based news channel, that has been in business since 1980.
The lawsuit has been filed in the U.S. District Court – Southern District of New York. Through it, CNN claims that Perplexity knowingly violated its content restrictions, and used the broadcaster’s copyrighted material to back its AI chatbot responses to user queries.
The filing also claims that in 2025, CNN had sought to finalize a content deal with Perplexity, but owing to terms differences, the deal was not successful.
“As a result, before and after Perplexity’s negotiations with CNN, Perplexity knew that it was not permitted to access CNN’s content or to use its trademarks or service marks,” the channel has noted.
CNN on Thursday reported that it did get a response from Perplexity addressing the development. In a statement to CNN, Perplexity’s chief communications officer Jesse Dwyer said that facts cannot be copyrighted.
While further details around the court batte between the two entities remain awaited, CNN has said that AI firms like Perplexity must shake on sensible licensing arrangements before sourcing content from news publications for their AI chatbot responses. If not, the AI companies must pay for legal damages.
Perplexity has faced similar legal strikes from other publications like the Times and the Tribune as well. Perplexity, in its previous response to such legal strikes, has maintained that news publications cannot monopolize facts.
AI companies and news publications have been locking horns over content sharing for a while now. In 2023, The Times had called out OpenAI and Microsoft for using its stories to train ChatGPT. The case is still active and has evolved into a heavily litigated court battle.
On the other hand, some news publications like Vox Media and The Atlantic have signed multi-million-dollar content distribution deals directly with OpenAI, Google, and Meta