May 28 - CNN filed a lawsuit on Thursday accusing Perplexity, an AI-powered search and answer service, of unlawfully distributing CNN's copyrighted material. The complaint frames the legal action as a challenge to what CNN describes as the commercial exploitation of reporting produced by human journalists.
In a statement accompanying the filing, the Warner Bros. Discovery-owned news organization said: "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."
The CNN complaint is the latest in a string of legal challenges targeting Perplexity, which uses artificial intelligence to scan websites and respond to user queries. Plaintiffs in related cases include The New York Times, Reddit and Dow Jones, each alleging Perplexity infringed copyrighted content and improperly scraped data to train its systems.
CNN emphasized the broader stakes for news organizations. "The public rely on high-quality news journalism reported by human beings to understand their world, which is frequently dangerous and expensive to produce. Commercial operators can and must pay to make use of it," the network said.
The statement continued: "We prefer that they do so through sensible licensing arrangements, but if they refuse to do that as Perplexity has so far refused to do, they will have to pay through legal damages. There is no free option."
Since the debut of OpenAI's ChatGPT in 2022, publishers and individual writers have expressed concern about their reporting and written work being repurposed within chatbot-style query responses. Those concerns have prompted disputes over copyright, ownership and compensation for source material appearing in AI-generated outputs.
Several news organizations have negotiated licensing arrangements or formed partnerships with large technology firms and companies developing generative AI, aiming to provide models with verified news sources while securing compensation and links back to original articles.
This latest lawsuit adds to an expanding legal landscape in which publishers are testing whether and how established copyright protections apply to AI systems that aggregate, summarize, or otherwise reuse reported material. Perplexity now faces multiple suits from prominent publishing entities asserting similar claims.
The case filed by CNN underscores the friction between news publishers seeking remuneration and attribution for their reporting and AI companies that rely on broad web access to develop and refine their products. How courts resolve these disputes could influence licensing discussions and commercial arrangements between media companies and AI developers.