A Perplexity lawsuit tracker as of mid-2026 shows the San Francisco AI search company defending at least nine copyright cases brought by news publishers and authors, a federal computer-fraud suit from Amazon that already produced a preliminary injunction, and a proposed privacy class action. The plaintiffs include Dow Jones, The New York Times, CNN, Encyclopædia Britannica, Merriam-Webster, three Japanese newspaper groups, and a group of authors led by investigative reporter John Carreyrou. Most cases are in early stages. The Dow Jones case is the furthest along and has already produced the first substantive court ruling against Perplexity.
Dow Jones and News Corp
Dow Jones & Company and NYP Holdings — publishers of The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Barron’s, and Financial News — filed the first major publisher suit on October 21, 2024, in the Southern District of New York. The complaint alleges copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 101 along with trademark claims including false designation of origin and dilution.1CourtListener. Dow Jones & Company, Inc. v. Perplexity AI, Inc., 1:24-cv-07984
An amended complaint filed December 11, 2024, accused Perplexity of “massive illegal copying” and said the product encourages users to “skip the links” to original articles, stripping publishers of advertising and subscription revenue. The plaintiffs also alleged the system produces fabricated statements, or “hallucinations,” falsely attributed to their publications.2AFS Law. Generative AI Meets Generative Litigation: News Corp Continues Its Battle
Perplexity moved to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction and improper venue, or alternatively to transfer the case to California. On August 21, 2025, Judge Katherine Polk Failla denied every part of the motion, finding that Perplexity transacts business in New York through a registered presence, office staff, and targeted advertising.3Bloomberg Tax. Perplexity AI Can’t Escape Dow Jones Training Copyright Suit She also rejected Perplexity’s attempt to dismiss claims tied to ten additional copyrighted works.4FindLaw. Dow Jones & Company Inc. v. Perplexity AI Inc.
The opinion matters beyond its procedural outcome. Judge Failla described Perplexity’s retrieval-augmented generation process as a three-stage mechanism of alleged infringement: copying publisher content into a RAG index, producing outputs with verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, and generating hallucinated text falsely attributed to the plaintiffs. She noted that the system “repackages the original, indexed content in written responses” and flagged a possible path to inducement liability under the Supreme Court’s 2005 MGM Studios v. Grokster standard.5MusicTech Solutions. Judge Failla’s Opinion in Dow Jones v. Perplexity: RAG as Mechanism of Infringement
The case is now in discovery. Fact discovery closes July 20, 2026, expert discovery October 19, 2026, with a pretrial conference set for September 15, 2026. No trial date has been set.6ChatGPT Is Eating the World. Dow Jones v. Perplexity
The New York Times
The New York Times sued Perplexity on December 5, 2025, in the same federal court, alleging the search engine retrieves and reproduces “large chunks” of its content, including entire articles, in a manner that competes with the Times’ own offerings and does not qualify as fair use.7The New York Times. New York Times Sues Perplexity AI It was the Times’ second AI case, after its 2023 suit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The Times said it spent 18 months attempting to resolve the dispute privately before filing.
The court accepted the Times case as related to the Dow Jones litigation, and both were assigned to Judge Loretta A. Preska.8CourtListener. The New York Times Company v. Perplexity AI, Inc., 1:25-cv-10106 In March 2026, Perplexity moved to dismiss portions of the Times case and a parallel suit by the Chicago Tribune, invoking the Second Circuit’s 2008 decision in Cartoon Network v. CSC Holdings to argue it lacks the “volitional conduct” required for direct infringement because its system responds automatically to user prompts.9Law360. Perplexity Says It Didn’t Knowingly Infringe Papers’ Content The Times and Tribune responded that the system was deliberately designed to ingest, index, and reproduce content, and that paywall circumvention and verbatim commercial delivery distinguish Perplexity from Cartoon Network.10Spencer West. Is Perplexity’s No-Volition Copyright Strategy a Clever Legal Shield or a Long Shot The court had not ruled on the motion as of mid-2026.
CNN
CNN filed a 54-page complaint in the Southern District of New York on May 28, 2026, alleging that Perplexity “unlawfully crawls, scrapes, copies, and distributes” more than 17,000 news stories, videos, and images. The suit brings both copyright and trademark claims; on the trademark side, CNN alleged Perplexity falsely implied a business relationship by advertising that “Comet Plus” subscribers could access CNN’s premium content.11Bloomberg Law. CNN Latest News Outlet to Sue Perplexity AI Over Data Scraping12TechTimes. AI Regulation 2026 Opens Three Fronts
CNN said it tried to negotiate a licensing deal in 2025 and failed. “Because Perplexity has refused sensible licensing arrangements, they will have to pay through legal damages,” the network said. “There is no free option.”13CNN. CNN Sues Perplexity AI Over Copyright
Encyclopædia Britannica and Merriam-Webster
Britannica and Merriam-Webster jointly sued Perplexity on September 10, 2025, in the Southern District of New York, alleging copyright and trademark infringement. The complaint argues that Perplexity’s existing licensing agreements with other publishers effectively concede a market exists for the content and that use without permission requires compensation.14Susman Godfrey. Britannica v. Perplexity Complaint Perplexity had not filed a substantive reply as of mid-2026.15Tech Policy Press. The Missing Fair Use Argument in the Copyright Battle Over AI Summaries
Japanese Publishers
Perplexity faces two active suits in Tokyo District Court. Yomiuri Shimbun, through three Yomiuri entities, filed on August 7, 2025, alleging that Perplexity acquired 119,467 articles from Yomiuri Shimbun Online between February and June 2025 without permission, violating reproduction and public transmission rights under Japanese copyright law. The suit seeks roughly 2.17 billion yen (about $18.9 million), calculated using a per-article licensing rate plus lost advertising revenue, and asks the court to order Perplexity to stop using the paper’s articles and images.16The Straits Times. Yomiuri Sues US AI Startup Over Use of Articles
The Asahi Shimbun and Nikkei filed a joint action on August 26, 2025, seeking an injunction, deletion of stored content, and 2.2 billion yen (about $14.9 million) in damages per company.17The Asahi Shimbun. Asahi Shimbun and Nikkei Sue Perplexity AI
The Authors’ Lawsuit
Perplexity is one of six defendants in a copyright suit filed December 22, 2025, in the Northern District of California by a group of writers and journalists including John Carreyrou, known for his reporting on Theranos. The complaint alleges that Perplexity, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, and xAI used pirated copies of authors’ books downloaded from shadow libraries such as LibGen, Z-Library, and OceanofPDF to train or optimize their products.18Publishers Weekly. Authors File New Lawsuit Against AI Companies Seeking More Money Perplexity’s head of communications, Jesse Dwyer, denied the allegation: “Perplexity doesn’t index books.”19Bloomberg Law. OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI Hit With Copyright Lawsuit From Writers
In February 2026, Perplexity moved to sever itself from the multi-defendant case and dismiss the claims against it. The court had granted severance for some other defendants, including OpenAI and Meta, but had not ruled on Perplexity’s motion as of mid-2026.20Mishcon de Reya. Generative AI Intellectual Property Cases and Policy Tracker
Amazon’s Suit Over the Comet Browser
Separate from the copyright cases, Amazon sued Perplexity in the Northern District of California in November 2025 over its Comet AI browser. Amazon alleged that Comet accessed its site, including password-protected sections, by disguising the AI agent as a regular Chrome session. The company said it had warned Perplexity at least five times beginning in November 2024 and implemented technical blocks in August 2025, which Perplexity allegedly bypassed.21GeekWire. Judge Blocks Perplexity’s AI Bot From Shopping on Amazon
On March 9, 2026, Senior U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney granted a preliminary injunction blocking Comet from accessing Amazon’s site, finding Amazon likely to succeed on claims under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and a California computer fraud statute. The judge found that Comet accessed accounts “with the Amazon user’s permission, but without authorization by Amazon.” Perplexity called the suit a “bully tactic” aimed at protecting Amazon’s own AI shopping tools from competition.22CNBC. Amazon Wins Court Order to Block Perplexity’s AI Shopping Agent
Privacy Class Action
A pseudonymous plaintiff filed a proposed class action against Perplexity, Google, and Meta in federal court in San Francisco on March 31, 2026. The 135-page complaint alleges that tracking tools embedded in Perplexity’s code — Meta Pixel, Google Ads, and Google DoubleClick — harvested user chat data and shared it with Meta and Google without consent. The complaint says intercepted data included email addresses, Facebook IDs, IP addresses, device information, and the full text of user prompts and AI responses, even when users activated Perplexity’s “incognito mode.”23Local News Matters. Class Action Lawsuit Alleges Perplexity Sent User Chats to Google, Meta Without Consent The suit includes 14 counts under California privacy and computer fraud laws, the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and constitutional privacy protections, and seeks $5,000 per violation.24Privado AI. Perplexity AI Faces CIPA Class Action Lawsuit Perplexity said it had not been served as of early April 2026.
How Perplexity Is Defending Itself
Across the suits, Perplexity has advanced a consistent set of arguments. The company maintains it does not crawl or scrape websites, saying it relies on “user-driven agents” that fetch content only in response to specific requests and that these agents “do not store the information or train with it.” Where its answers include excerpts, Perplexity argues they are “limited and non-competitive in nature” and constitute fair use of publicly reported facts. In the Dow Jones case, the company called examples of substantial copying “anomalous” and said some had been engineered by plaintiffs in bad faith.15Tech Policy Press. The Missing Fair Use Argument in the Copyright Battle Over AI Summaries
In the Times and Chicago Tribune cases, Perplexity added the “no volition” theory, arguing that because its system responds automatically to user prompts, the user — not Perplexity — performs any act of copying.10Spencer West. Is Perplexity’s No-Volition Copyright Strategy a Clever Legal Shield or a Long Shot Perplexity’s own documentation says its Perplexity-User agent “generally ignores robots.txt rules” because “a user requested the fetch.”25Perplexity AI. Perplexity Crawlers
Judge Failla’s August 2025 ruling pushed back on these defenses in the Dow Jones case by treating the RAG architecture itself as the mechanism of infringement and leaving open an inducement theory under Grokster. Commentators have noted that Perplexity’s revenue-sharing deals with other publishers may complicate the “non-competitive” element of fair use, since those deals suggest a licensing market exists.15Tech Policy Press. The Missing Fair Use Argument in the Copyright Battle Over AI Summaries
Why the Licensing Deals Keep Coming Up
Perplexity launched a Publishers Program in July 2024, offering revenue sharing on advertising generated when a user’s query cites a publisher’s article. Initial partners included Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and WordPress.com, with a goal of 30 publishers by the end of 2024. The program was announced shortly after Forbes and Wired publicly accused Perplexity of plagiarizing their reporting.26CNBC. Perplexity AI to Share Revenue With Publishers After Plagiarism Accusations
Perplexity later rolled out “Comet Plus,” a $5 subscription tier that routes 80 percent of revenue to participating publishers, with a $42.5 million pool. Partners include Blavity, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Gannett, The Independent, and Time.27Digiday. How Perplexity’s New Revenue Model Works By 2025, licensees also included the Los Angeles Times and John Wiley & Sons.14Susman Godfrey. Britannica v. Perplexity Complaint In January 2026, Perplexity signed a Wikipedia data licensing agreement with the Wikimedia Foundation, alongside Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Mistral AI.28CNBC. Wikipedia, Amazon, Meta, Perplexity AI
None of the suing publishers participate in these programs. CNN, the Times, and Dow Jones each tried to reach licensing terms before filing and failed. Plaintiffs across the suits point to the existence of the paying partnerships as evidence that a licensing market exists for the content Perplexity is accused of taking without authorization.