CNN Sues Perplexity for Stealing 17,000 Articles and Faking Partnership
AI wrappers are learning the hard way that "borrowing" content isn't a business model. CNN has officially joined the war against Perplexity, throwing a massive lawsuit at the startup for pretending they were best buddies while strip-mining their archives.
The legal battle landed in the federal court of the Southern District of New York, where CNN dumped a massive 54-page complaint backed by 1,165 pages of exhibits. This mountain of paperwork documents how Perplexity allegedly copied, scraped, and redistributed CNN's journalistic output, making the broadcaster the very first TV network to sue the startup.
The lawsuit outlines two main sins. First, there is the standard copyright claim, accusing Perplexity of cloning CNN's articles to present identical or highly similar answers to users, essentially trying to run a news business without paying for the actual reporters. The second claim is much funnier: trademark infringement, because Perplexity allegedly offered a Comet Plus subscription that hinted at a premium partnership with CNN, despite the network having never agreed to such a thing.
It turns out CNN did try to play nice last year, attempting to negotiate a license deal, but Perplexity walked away when the price tag presumably looked higher than zero. Armed with this history, the lawyers argue the startup knowingly looted their archives while fully aware they lacked permission. In response, Perplexity communications chief Jesse Dwyer casually shrugged, stating that "facts cannot be copyrighted," a bold defense usually favored by students copying homework.
The broadcaster is demanding unspecified damages and a permanent injunction to block the AI search engine. This lawsuit joins an increasingly crowded docket, as Perplexity is already fighting off legal attacks from The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, News Corp, Dow Jones, Britannica, and Reddit, while Amazon has accused the developer of the Comet browser of straight-up fraud.
As the legal pile-on grows to over forty AI-related copyright cases in US courts, the dream of building billion-dollar Silicon Valley startups on stolen intellectual property is facing a brutal reality check. The ultimate irony remains that AI search engines are desperate to replace traditional journalists, yet their entire existence relies on those same journalists continuing to write things worth stealing.
Source: CNN
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