Key Takeaways:
CNN's lawsuit against Perplexity AI marks the first copyright infringement case filed by a television network against a generative AI company, escalating the media industry's legal campaign to force AI firms to pay for news content.
CNN on Thursday filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, accusing the AI search engine of unlawfully copying and distributing its copyrighted content without permission. The suit joins a wave of legal actions by publishers including the New York Times, News Corp and the Chicago Tribune, all of which have sued Perplexity over similar allegations in the past two years.
"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," a CNN spokesperson said in a statement. "The public rely on high quality news journalism reported by human beings to understand their world, which is frequently dangerous and expensive to produce. Commercial operators can and must pay to make use of it."
The Warner Bros.-owned network said it sought a content licensing deal with Perplexity last year but failed to agree on terms. "Before and after Perplexity's negotiations with CNN, Perplexity knew that it was not permitted to access CNN's content or to use its trademarks or service marks," the lawsuit states. CNN emphasized it "actively embraces the opportunities AI creates" and has "multiple commercial partnerships, active agreements, and ongoing discussions with responsible industry players," including a publicly reported deal with Meta in December 2025.
The lawsuit reflects the two-track strategy major news companies are pursuing: filing copyright infringement suits against AI firms that refuse to pay while striking licensing deals with those that will. Publishers including Gannett, TIME, Le Monde and Der Spiegel have signed content agreements with Perplexity during the same period that News Corp, the New York Times and others have pursued litigation. Perplexity, in a legal response to the Times and the Chicago Tribune, argued that attempts "to stop this novel technology by monopolizing facts will founder on bedrock principles of intellectual property law that have consistently permitted innovative technologies like Perplexity to exist."
What's at stake for the AI industry
The outcome of these lawsuits could reshape the economics of generative AI, where models rely on vast amounts of web content for training and real-time query responses. If courts rule that AI search engines must license content from publishers, the cost structure for companies like Perplexity — which competes with Google and OpenAI's ChatGPT — would increase substantially. The legal pressure has already pushed some AI firms to strike licensing deals, with Meta, OpenAI and Google all announcing publisher partnerships in the past 18 months. Perplexity faces at least six active copyright lawsuits from publishers, and the CNN case introduces a television network as a plaintiff for the first time, potentially broadening the scope of damages and the types of content at issue.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
