About the Dow Jones lawsuit

On Monday, we got sued by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.  We were disappointed and surprised to see this.

There are around three dozen lawsuits by media companies against generative AI tools. The common theme betrayed by those complaints collectively is that they wish this technology didn’t exist. They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.

That is not our view of the world.

We believe that tools like Perplexity provide a fundamentally transformative way for people to learn facts about the world. Perplexity not only does so in a way that the law has always recognized but is essential for the sound functioning of a cultural ecosystem in which people can efficiently and effectively obtain and engage with knowledge created by others.

Perplexity, from its founding moment, has always listed sources above answers and provided in-line citations for every part of an answer. We are glad that other AI chatbots have begun copying Perplexity's transparency and emphasis on sources in their products. In fact, the Wall Street Journal itself earlier this year ranked Perplexity the #1 overall chatbot in their “Great AI Challenge.”

The lawsuit reflects an adversarial posture between media and tech that is—while depressingly familiar—fundamentally shortsighted, unnecessary, and self-defeating.  We should all be working together to offer people amazing new tools and build genuinely pie-expanding businesses.  There are countless things we would love to do beyond what the default application of law allows, which entail mutually beneficial commercial relationships with counterparties like the companies here who chose to sue rather than cooperate. Perplexity is proud to have launched a first-of-its-kind revenue-sharing program with leading publishers like TIME, Fortune, and Der Spiegel, which have already signed on.  And our door is always open if and when the Post and the Journal decide to work with us in good faith, just as numerous others already have.  

Unless and until that happens, though, we will defend ourselves in this lawsuit. This is not the place to get into the weeds of all of that, but we want to make two quick points at the outset:

First, the facts alleged in the complaint are misleading at best. Cited examples of “regurgitated” outputs explicitly mischaracterize the source of the material. They are disingenuous in their description of what happened even in the specific cited instances, as well as in their broader depiction of what Perplexity is for (spoiler alert: it’s not for reprising the full text of articles that can be more directly and efficiently obtained elsewhere). And the suggestion that we never responded to outreach from News Corp. is simply false: they reached out; we responded the very same day; instead of continuing the dialogue, they filed this lawsuit.

Second, we have learned in the short time since this lawsuit was filed, a disturbing trend in these types of cases: The companies that are suing make all kinds of salacious allegations in their complaints about all kinds of seemingly bad things they were able to coax the AI tools to do—and then, when pressed in the litigation for details of things like how they achieved such obviously unrepresentative results, they immediately disavow the very examples they put in the public record, and swear they won’t actually use them in the case. We presume that is what will happen here. And that will tell you everything you need to know about the strength of their case.

AI-enhanced search engines are not going away. Perplexity is not going away. We look forward to a time in the future when we can focus all of our energy and attention on offering innovative tools to customers, in collaboration with media companies.