CNN filed a lawsuit against AI search engine Perplexity on May 28 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, accusing it of unauthorized scraping of over 17,000 CNN news articles, videos, and images, and distributing competing content to users that is identical or substantially similar to the original. In a statement, CNN said, „Perplexity, with a market value in the tens of billions of dollars, should not be allowed to profit by plagiarizing original content.“ This case is CNN’s first copyright lawsuit against an AI company and is also considered the first such lawsuit by a U.S. television network against an AI company for copyright infringement; CNN is seeking an injunction and an undisclosed amount in damages. In response, Perplexity’s Chief Communications Officer Jesse Dwyer stated that „facts are not copyrightable."
A Variety report, citing sources, noted that CNN and Perplexity had previously been in talks about a licensing partnership, implying that the latter continued to scrape content despite being aware of the relevant rules. This case, following lawsuits by The New York Times, Dow Jones (parent company of The Wall Street Journal), and the New York Post, marks another mainstream media organization taking an AI company to court, reflecting the systemic struggle within the media industry between copyright protection and commercial monetization in the age of AI. The industry currently presents two parallel paths: some organizations are turning to litigation, while others are signing licensing agreements with companies like OpenAI and Google for compensation.