The New York Times and Chicago Tribune don sue Perplexity AI because dem use copyrighted news for RAG

The New York Times and Chicago Tribune don file federal lawsuit, dem say Perplexity AI copy and redistribute paid, archived and paywalled journalism to run im Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) search answers. Plaintiffs talk say Perplexity scrape publishers' archives and reproduce reporting word-for-word or near word-for-word, wey cause traffic to scatter, wrong attribution and loss of subscription plus ad revenue. Dem dey ask court make e stop use the content, make any stored copyrighted material comot, and pay money damages. Perplexity deny say dem do wrong and dem call the complaints normal industry reaction to disruptive tech. These cases be part of bigger wave of over 40 copyright lawsuits worldwide wey dey target AI firms (including cases against OpenAI, Anthropic and others). The litigation fit force clearer licensing rules for AI training data and change how generative search and RAG systems handle news — fit make AI companies move toward licensed data deals like the ones Meta dey pursue. For crypto traders, the dispute show regulatory and legal risk around AI services wey dey ingest news feeds and web content; platforms wey integrate tokenized news access, on-chain content licensing, or projects building AI+crypto products suppose dey monitored for higher compliance costs, possible content-delivery changes and partnership opportunities with licensed publishers.