CNN Files Copyright Lawsuit Against Perplexity Over Unlawful Content Distribution

The American news broadcaster CNN has filed a federal lawsuit against AI startup Perplexity, accusing the generative search engine of unlawfully scraping and distributing over 17,000 copyrighted news stories.

NEW YORK, May 29, 2026 : Broadcaster CNN has initiated legal action against artificial intelligence company Perplexity, marking the first time a television network has filed a major copyright infringement lawsuit within the generative AI sector. The complaint, submitted to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that the tech firm routinely crawls, scrapes, and exploits copyrighted journalistic assets to power its commercial products without obtaining permissions.

According to the filed legal documents, Perplexity has copied more than 17,000 of CNN’s articles, videos, and images to establish an AI-first search index. The media network asserts that the AI-powered response engine reproduces verbatim fragments or highly similar summaries of original news pieces, directly competing with the network’s own digital platforms.

The lawsuit further alleges trademark violations, pointing out that Perplexity falsely informed its premium “Comet Plus” subscribers that the service possessed a licensed partnership to access CNN’s content, despite negotiations between the two entities collapsing late last year.

A corporate spokesperson for CNN emphasized that high-quality journalism is expensive to produce and that commercial artificial intelligence operators must pay for the intellectual property they exploit. The news organization is currently seeking undisclosed monetary damages alongside a permanent court order to block Perplexity from indexing its content.

In response to the litigation, Perplexity’s chief communications officer, Jesse Dwyer, issued a brief statement declaring that facts cannot be copyrighted. The lawsuit is part of a broader wave of legal friction between copyright holders and AI companies.

Perplexity is already facing concurrent lawsuits from major media conglomerates, including the New York Times, Reddit, and Dow Jones, regarding unauthorized data scraping practices for technological development.

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