The Times and the Tribune sue Perplexity a day apart

The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Perplexity on the fifth of December, saying the AI search company copied its journalism to deliver it to customers “without permission or compensation”. The Chicago Tribune had filed its own suit a day earlier, on the fourth of December, alleging Perplexity unlawfully copied millions of its stories, videos and images to feed its consumer answer engine, enterprise chatbot, its application programming interfaces and its Comet browser.

Two newsrooms reaching the same legal conclusion within a day of each other points to a shared read of where settlement talks with Perplexity have stalled, after many other publishers chose licensing deals instead.

Two lawsuits filed a day apart read less like coincidence and more like a shared verdict on where talks with Perplexity went

Perplexity’s business depends on summarising and answering from material it does not own, a premise that has already drawn a separate Amazon suit over its shopping agent and years of publisher warnings that answer engines strip away the traffic that once funded the reporting itself. The Times and Tribune complaints allege systematic copying across each paper’s entire archive, delivered through a named consumer browser as well as backend software that readers never see, rather than a dispute over a single contested output.

Nothing here has been decided by a court. The pairing suggests newsroom patience with scrape-first AI products is narrowing, even as the same companies keep signing licensing deals with other outlets that chose a different route.