The owner of the Financial Times is suing an AI giant over claims it illegally scraped content from articles to train a chatbot.
Nikkei has filed a lawsuit alongside the daily Japanese title The Asahi Shimbun against Perplexity AI, accusing the US tech company of copyright infringement.
The two media groups allege that Perplexity used their articles without permission to help train and provide answers for its Google-style search engine since June last year.
Nikkei and the Asahi also accused the company’s AI software of inserting errors into responses attributed to the titles, which they said “severely damages” their credibility.
The publishers said: “This course of Perplexity’s actions amounts to large-scale, ongoing ‘free riding’ on article content that journalists from both companies have spent immense time and effort to research and write, while Perplexity pays no compensation.
“If left unchecked, this situation could undermine the foundation of journalism, which is committed to conveying facts accurately, and ultimately threaten the core of democracy.”
The two media publishers are seeking an injunction to ensure Perplexity stops stealing content and deletes all existing data, while also seeking damages of 2.2bn yen (£11m) each.
News publishers are increasingly targeting tech companies amid concerns that the rapid development of AI is fuelling widespread copyright infringement.
Perplexity, which is based in San Francisco, is already facing legal action from Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and New York Post.
The BBC has also threatened an injunction against the company over claims it has ripped off the broadcaster’s stories. Perplexity has branded the BBC’s allegations “manipulative and opportunistic”.
Perplexity, which was founded in 2022, is an AI-powered search engine that enables users to search the web by asking questions in a conversational style. It runs a default language model and also provides subscribers with access to others, including ChatGPT and Claude.
The company, which counts Amazon founder Jeff Bezos among its investors, has more than 30m users and last month secured an $18bn valuation following a fresh funding round.
However, the joint action by Nikkei and Asahi opens up a new front in the conflict between the tech and creative industries.
Nikkei, which was founded as a market news provider in 1876, has grown into one of the world’s largest media organisations with roughly 1,500 journalists worldwide. It bought the Financial Times from Pearson in a £844m deal in 2015.
The Left-leaning Asahi Shimbun – or “rising sun newspaper” – is one of Japan’s oldest dailies and considered a paper of record in the country.
Perplexity has been contacted for comment.
