CNN has filed a lawsuit against AI search engine Perplexity, accusing the company of unlawfully copying and distributing its journalism. The case marks CNN’s first legal action against an AI company and reportedly the first ever brought by a television network.
CNN filed the suit on Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The complaint accuses Perplexity of scraping more than 17,000 CNN stories, photos, videos, and other content to power its products. The lawsuit says Perplexity distributed identical or substantially similar competing content using that material.
According to the 54-page complaint, Perplexity unlawfully crawls, scrapes, copies, and distributes CNN’s content from CNN and third-party platforms. It then uses that material to build an AI-first search index that delivers CNN’s reporting in real time to large language models. CNN alleges these actions erode the need for people to subscribe to its content, undermining the economic model that makes original reporting possible.
CNN says the two sides tried to reach a deal before going to court. The network spoke to Perplexity about a licensing arrangement last year but could not agree on terms, including restrictions on how the chatbot uses CNN’s content. After negotiations fell through, the network blocked Perplexity’s scraping bot from accessing its content. CNN argues that before and after those negotiations, Perplexity knew it was not permitted to access CNN’s content or use its trademarks.
In the complaint, CNN points to Perplexity’s former ads claiming the tool helps users skip the extra steps and clicks they would normally take to access news content.
“CNN’s lawsuit stands for the proposition that Perplexity, a company valued at tens of billions of dollars, should not be able to steal from entities that create the original content Perplexity exploits. By exploiting CNN’s reporting in this manner, Perplexity violates the protections afforded by copyright law and undermines the economic incentives that make original newsgathering possible,” CNN said in the complaint.
A CNN spokesperson framed the case as a stand against theft. The spokesperson said Perplexity, valued at tens of billions of dollars, should not be able to steal from the entities that create the original content it exploits. The statement added that high-quality journalism is dangerous and expensive to produce, and that commercial operators must pay to use it.
Perplexity rejected the allegations bluntly. Spokesperson Jesse Dwyer responded simply that you cannot copyright facts. CNN has asked the court to award statutory damages and to order Perplexity to stop using its content, without specifying a dollar figure. Statutory damages under U.S. copyright law can be substantial, especially when infringement is found to be willful.
Perplexity already faces lawsuits from the New York Times, Reddit, and Dow Jones, among others. CNN joins the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal’s parent company, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Merriam-Webster in suing the company. Other publishers, including Time and USA Today, have instead struck licensing deals with Perplexity.
You can follow the lawsuit report here.
