Perplexity lawsuits at a glance
Perplexity AI runs an answer engine: it retrieves pages from the web when a user asks a question and writes a summarized answer with citations. That design is why its litigation looks different from the suits against model developers. Most cases against OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta turn on copying works to train a model. The Perplexity cases turn on what happens at answer time, when the product fetches a publisher's article and restates it, a technique called retrieval-augmented generation.
The plaintiffs fall into three groups. News and reference publishers allege copyright infringement and, where an answer invents facts and credits them to the publisher, trademark violations. Platforms allege unlawful access: Reddit says its posts were scraped through intermediaries, and Amazon says Perplexity's Comet browser agent entered customer accounts without Amazon's permission. A third, smaller group is consumer class actions by Perplexity's own users.
Perplexity has also signed revenue-sharing deals with some outlets, including Time, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and the Los Angeles Times, and in August 2025 set aside $42.5 million for a publisher program tied to its Comet browser, according to Fortune. The suits below come from companies that did not reach a deal or reject the terms on offer.
Who is suing Perplexity? Case table
The table lists each case this site could confirm from court filings, law firm alerts or established reporting, with status as of November 10, 2026. Docket numbers appear only where verified. Sources for each row are linked in the sections that follow.
| Case | Parties | Court | Filed | Status | Last ruling or event | Issue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dow Jones & Co. v. Perplexity AI, No. 1:24-cv-07984 | Dow Jones and NYP Holdings (New York Post) v. Perplexity AI | S.D.N.Y. (Judge Katherine Polk Failla) | Oct. 21, 2024 | Pending, discovery | Aug. 21, 2025: motion to dismiss or transfer denied | Copyright; trademark over fabricated attributions |
| Encyclopaedia Britannica v. Perplexity AI, No. 1:25-cv-07546 | Britannica and Merriam-Webster v. Perplexity AI | S.D.N.Y. (Judge Jennifer L. Rochon) | Sept. 10, 2025 | Pending | Partial motion to dismiss briefed by Dec. 2025; no ruling found | Copyright; trademark |
| Chicago Tribune Co. v. Perplexity AI | Chicago Tribune v. Perplexity AI | S.D.N.Y. (Judge Loretta Preska) | Dec. 4, 2025 | Pending | No ruling found | Copyright |
| The New York Times Co. v. Perplexity AI | The New York Times v. Perplexity AI | S.D.N.Y. (Judge Vernon S. Broderick) | Dec. 5, 2025 | Pending | No ruling found | Copyright; false attribution |
| CNN v. Perplexity AI | CNN v. Perplexity AI | S.D.N.Y. | May 28, 2026 | Pending | Complaint filed | Copyright; trademark |
| Reddit, Inc. v. SerpApi LLC, No. 1:25-cv-08736 | Reddit v. SerpApi, Oxylabs, AWMProxy and Perplexity AI | S.D.N.Y. (Judge Paul A. Engelmayer) | Oct. 22, 2025 | Pending | July 31, 2026: motions to dismiss largely denied | Anti-circumvention; scraping |
| Amazon.com Services v. Perplexity AI | Amazon v. Perplexity AI | N.D. Cal.; Ninth Circuit No. 26-1444 | Nov. 4, 2025 | Pending in district court | Aug. 4, 2026: preliminary injunction vacated on appeal | Computer access by an AI agent |
| Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun v. Perplexity | Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun v. Perplexity | Japan | Aug. 2025 | Reported pending | Complaint filed | Copyright; unfair competition |
| Gagleard v. Perplexity AI, No. 3:26-cv-05949 | Paid subscribers v. Perplexity AI | N.D. Cal. (Judge William H. Orrick) | June 17, 2026 | Pending | Sept. 24, 2026: Perplexity moved to compel arbitration | Consumer claims over usage limits |
Filing dates for the Tribune, Times, CNN, Reddit and Amazon suits and the details of the subscriber case are taken from Settlement Insight's docket summary dated September 30, 2026, cross-checked against the reporting cited below. Judge assignments for the Times and Tribune cases come from a docket tracker's December 2025 note that Judge Failla declined to treat them as related to the Dow Jones case, which is why three publisher suits sit before three different judges.
News publisher cases
Dow Jones v. Perplexity
Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post sued on October 21, 2024 in the Southern District of New York. Both are News Corp companies. The suit alleges that Perplexity copies their articles at scale to feed its answer engine and that its answers sometimes contain invented details credited to their publications, which is the basis for the trademark claims. Perplexity asked the court to dismiss the case or transfer it to another court. On August 21, 2025 Judge Katherine Polk Failla refused, as Reuters reported; the opinion is public.
The case is the furthest along. Perplexity answered the second amended complaint in October 2025, the court entered a protocol for inspecting Perplexity's source code in January 2026, and a February 2026 order set fact discovery to close on July 20, 2026 and expert discovery on October 19, 2026, according to the Chat GPT Is Eating the World docket tracker. We found no summary judgment ruling and no trial date as of November 10, 2026.
NYT v. Perplexity
The New York Times sued Perplexity in the Southern District of New York on December 5, 2025, more than a year after sending a cease and desist notice, TechCrunch reported. The complaint alleges that Perplexity's answers substitute for Times journalism and that the product attributes fabricated material to the Times. The Chicago Tribune filed its own suit in the same court a day earlier, on December 4, 2025. The Times case went to Judge Vernon S. Broderick and the Tribune case to Judge Loretta Preska. We found no ruling in either case as of November 10, 2026. The Times is also a plaintiff against OpenAI and Microsoft; see NYT v. OpenAI.
Britannica v. Perplexity
Encyclopaedia Britannica and its subsidiary Merriam-Webster sued on September 10, 2025 in the Southern District of New York, No. 1:25-cv-07546, before Judge Jennifer L. Rochon. The complaint has three counts: copyright infringement by copying their content as input, copyright infringement in the answers Perplexity outputs, and trademark claims. In November 2025 Perplexity moved to dismiss only the output count, arguing that the user who types the prompt, not Perplexity, causes any copy that appears in an answer, Bloomberg Law reported. The publishers opposed, and briefing closed in December 2025. The scheduling order runs discovery to March 15, 2027, according to the docket tracker. We found no decision on the motion as of November 10, 2026.
CNN and the Japanese publishers
CNN sued on May 28, 2026 in the Southern District of New York, alleging that Perplexity copied its reporting to power its products and presented inaccurate and fabricated information as CNN's. Perplexity's communications chief, Jesse Dwyer, answered: "You can't copyright facts" (NPR; Al Jazeera).
Outside the United States, Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun sued Perplexity in Japan in August 2025, each seeking 2.2 billion yen, about $15 million. They allege that Perplexity copied and stored articles while ignoring technical measures meant to block crawling, and that inaccurate summaries credited to the papers breach Japan's Unfair Competition Prevention Act (Fortune).
Platform and scraping cases
Reddit v. SerpApi and Perplexity
Reddit sued on October 22, 2025 in the Southern District of New York. The defendants are Perplexity and three data-scraping providers: SerpApi, Oxylabs and AWMProxy. Reddit's theory is that Perplexity obtained Reddit posts indirectly, through services that pull them from Google search results in a way that defeats anti-bot controls. That makes it primarily a claim under the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, not an ordinary infringement suit.
Reddit filed an amended complaint in February 2026 and SerpApi and Perplexity moved to dismiss in March. On July 31, 2026 Judge Paul A. Engelmayer denied most of both motions and let the anti-circumvention claims against Perplexity and SerpApi proceed (MLex; Law360). In August 2026 he allowed the case to go forward without AWMProxy, which Reddit has been unable to locate. SerpApi has filed an antitrust counterclaim, and in October 2026 the judge paused discovery on it while Reddit's motion to dismiss the counterclaim is pending, according to the docket tracker.
Amazon v. Perplexity
Amazon sued in the Northern District of California on November 4, 2025 over Comet, Perplexity's browser with a built-in shopping agent. Amazon alleges that the agent logs in to customers' Amazon accounts and shops on their behalf after Amazon told Perplexity to stop, in violation of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and California's computer access statute. The district court granted a preliminary injunction in March 2026 (CNBC).
On August 4, 2026 the Ninth Circuit vacated that injunction in No. 26-1444. Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. wrote that, on the record so far, the user who directs the agent is the one who accesses Amazon's computers, not Perplexity, because the agent works through the user's own browser and Perplexity's servers never communicate with Amazon's directly. Jones Day's alert calls it the first appellate decision on how computer access statutes apply to agentic AI, and notes that the panel limited its holding to the current record. The underlying case continues in the district court.
Consumer class actions
Two class actions have been brought by Perplexity users. A privacy suit alleging that chats were shared with Meta and Google through tracking code was filed on March 31, 2026 and voluntarily dismissed by the plaintiff on May 1, 2026, before any ruling. A second suit, Gagleard v. Perplexity AI, filed June 17, 2026, alleges that Perplexity cut usage limits for paying subscribers without notice. Perplexity moved to compel arbitration and to dismiss on September 24, 2026, and a case management conference is set for December 8, 2026 (Settlement Insight; CourtListener docket).
What do the Perplexity AI lawsuit filings have in common?
Read together, the complaints make four recurring claims.
- Input copying. Perplexity is alleged to copy full articles into its index or retrieval pipeline without a license. This is count one in the Britannica complaint, and Perplexity did not move to dismiss it.
- Output copying. Answers are alleged to reproduce or closely paraphrase the source, so readers never click through. Perplexity's main defense at the pleading stage is that the user, not the company, causes any copy in an answer.
- False attribution. Where an answer contains invented facts or quotes credited to a publisher, plaintiffs plead trademark claims such as false designation of origin and dilution. Dow Jones, the Times, Britannica and CNN all make a version of this claim.
- Circumvention and unauthorized access. Reddit and Amazon do not rely on ordinary copyright infringement. Reddit pleads circumvention of technical controls, and Amazon pleads unauthorized access to its computers. The Japanese suit also alleges that robots.txt instructions were ignored.
No court has yet tested a fair use defense for an answer engine. The 2025 rulings in Bartz v. Anthropic and Kadrey v. Meta dealt with training, not with retrieval and summarization at answer time, so they do not settle the question for an answer engine. Our analysis of fair use in the age of AI covers the four factors, and market substitution, the claim that answers replace visits to the source, is central to the publisher complaints.
Has any court ruled against Perplexity?
Yes, on early motions, but no court has decided whether Perplexity infringed anyone's copyright. As of November 10, 2026 there are four rulings of note.
| Date | Court | Case | Ruling | Who it favored |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug. 21, 2025 | S.D.N.Y. | Dow Jones | Motion to dismiss or transfer denied | Publishers |
| March 2026 | N.D. Cal. | Amazon | Preliminary injunction against the Comet agent granted | Amazon |
| July 31, 2026 | S.D.N.Y. | Motions to dismiss largely denied | ||
| Aug. 4, 2026 | Ninth Circuit | Amazon | Preliminary injunction vacated | Perplexity |
Each of these is procedural. A denial of a motion to dismiss means only that the complaint states a claim if its allegations are true. The Ninth Circuit decision concerned a preliminary injunction and was expressly tied to the record at that stage. The Dow Jones case is the oldest and the furthest into discovery. For other AI litigation, see our cases hub.
Seven sets of US publisher and platform plaintiffs, from Dow Jones to CNN, Reddit and Amazon, have live suits against Perplexity AI as of November 10, 2026, and none has reached trial or settlement. Publishers survived dismissal in the Dow Jones case and Reddit largely did in its case, while Perplexity won the Ninth Circuit appeal over its Comet agent. No court has yet ruled on whether an answer engine's summaries are fair use.
What changed
- 2026-11-15: Page published, with case status verified as of November 10, 2026.
- 2026-09-24: Perplexity moved to compel arbitration in the paid-subscriber class action.
- 2026-08-04: Ninth Circuit vacated Amazon's preliminary injunction against the Comet agent.
- 2026-07-31: Judge Engelmayer largely denied the motions to dismiss in Reddit v. SerpApi.
- 2026-05-28: CNN sued Perplexity in the Southern District of New York.
- 2025-12-05: The New York Times sued Perplexity, one day after the Chicago Tribune.
- 2025-11-04: Amazon sued Perplexity over the Comet browser agent.
- 2025-10-22: Reddit sued Perplexity, SerpApi, Oxylabs and AWMProxy.
- 2025-09-10: Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sued Perplexity.
- 2025-08-21: Judge Failla denied Perplexity's motion to dismiss or transfer the Dow Jones case.
- 2024-10-21: Dow Jones and the New York Post filed the first US publisher suit against Perplexity.
Frequently asked questions
Who is suing Perplexity?
As of November 10, 2026: Dow Jones and the New York Post, Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster, the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times and CNN in New York federal court; Reddit, also in New York; Amazon in California; Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun in Japan; and paying subscribers in a California class action.
Why is Dow Jones suing Perplexity?
Dow Jones and the New York Post allege that Perplexity copies their articles to generate answers that replace the originals, and that some answers contain made-up details attributed to their publications. They sued in October 2024, and in August 2025 the court refused to dismiss or transfer the case.
Is Perplexity being sued for copyright?
Yes. The Dow Jones, Britannica, Chicago Tribune, New York Times and CNN suits all allege copyright infringement, usually alongside trademark claims over false attribution. The Reddit and Amazon suits are different: they allege circumvention of technical controls and unauthorized computer access.
Has any court ruled against Perplexity?
Only on early motions. Courts refused to dismiss the Dow Jones case in August 2025 and most of the Reddit case in July 2026. Amazon won a preliminary injunction in March 2026, but the Ninth Circuit vacated it on August 4, 2026. No court has ruled on infringement or fair use.
Sources
- S.D.N.Y.: Dow Jones v. Perplexity AI, No. 1:24-cv-07984, opinion on motion to dismiss (Aug. 21, 2025)
- Ninth Circuit: Amazon.com Services v. Perplexity AI, No. 26-1444, opinion (Aug. 4, 2026)
- CourtListener: Gagleard v. Perplexity AI docket
- Reuters: Perplexity AI loses bid to dismiss or transfer News Corp copyright case (Aug. 21, 2025)
- Jones Day: Ninth Circuit vacates CFAA injunction against Perplexity's Comet AI agent (Sept. 2026)
- MLex: US judge allows Reddit anti-circumvention claims v. Perplexity AI, SerpApi
- Law360: Reddit AI data scraping case mostly survives dismissal
- Bloomberg Law: Perplexity asks judge to ax user infringement claim in AI suit
- TechCrunch: The New York Times is suing Perplexity for copyright infringement (Dec. 5, 2025)
- NPR: CNN sues AI company Perplexity (May 28, 2026)
- Fortune: Perplexity faces suits from Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun (Aug. 26, 2025)
- Chat GPT Is Eating the World: Dow Jones v. Perplexity docket tracker
This page is journalism and commentary, not legal advice. AI law changes quickly; check the primary sources above and consult qualified counsel for your situation.