Perplexity, the $18 billion AI ‘answer machine’, wants to play nice with news publishers. They keep suing it anyway

Allegations of ignoring no-crawling signs

Beatrice Nolan is a

AI search engine Perplexity is facing a new headache amid its fraught relationship with publishers: another copyright lawsuit. The suit is filed on behalf of two of Japan’s largest media groups, Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun, and accuses the company of copying and storing article content and ignoring a “technical measure” designed to prevent this from happening. The media groups are seeking damages of ¥2.2bn ($15mn) each.

The lawsuit is a setback to the AI search engine’s efforts to play nice with online publishers, especially media organizations, whose content it heavily relies on to produce its AI answers.

Perplexity’s AI-powered “answer machine” crawls websites to access content, then uses that material to generate concise answers for users that include citations. The answers summarize information from multiple

To try and assuage some of these concerns, Perplexity has signed revenue-sharing partnerships with outlets including Fortune, Time, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and the Los Angeles Times, and has promised to give partner organizations access to its enterprise tools to build their own AI products.

Perplexity also recently launched a program allowing publishers to share revenue generated from their content through its Comet web browser and AI assistant. The startup has allocated $42.5 million for the initiative, with publishers receiving 80% of revenue from a new subscription tier, Comet Plus. Publishers will earn money when their articles drive traffic through Comet, appear in search queries, or assist users via the AI assistant.

Perplexity, which was founded in 2022, was last valued at $18 billion in a July funding round. The company regularly speaks of the importance of journalism for its product. Jessica Chan, the company’s head of publishing partnerships, previously told Fortune that the company needs a “thriving journalism and digital publishing ecosystem” and  “continual production” of

“There is really no world in which Perplexity is successful but publishers are not,” she said.

However, these efforts haven’t managed to prevent a growing list of media companies from pursuing legal action against the AI startup.

Perplexity has faced legal threats from the

The News Corp case and the latest lawsuit brought

In Japan, AI training on existing copyrighted works is partially permitted, but restrictions apply when content is copied or stored without consent or when publishers’ technical safeguards are ignored. In contrast, U.S. copyright law generally offers stronger protections for publishers, with courts scrutinizing reproduction and commercial use of content.

Nikkei and Asahi’s lawsuit also claims that Perplexity has damaged the papers’ credibility

In a statement shared with the Financial Times, which is owned

The claim also includes allegations that, in copying and storing news articles, Perplexity ignored technical safeguards like the “robots.txt” code used

The crawling issue has also caused friction between Cloudflare and Perplexity. The cybersecurity company has also alleged that Perplexity is

Perplexity did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.