Perplexity is an AI search tool that answers questions directly, the way a knowledgeable colleague might, instead of showing you a list of website links. The company processed around 780 million queries in May 2025, and it has since expanded into Snapchat's search feature. It is a product many professionals are already using at work without necessarily thinking much about where the answers come from.
CNN's case, filed May 29 in the Southern District of New York, alleges Perplexity copied more than 17,000 CNN stories, videos, and images. The lawsuit claims Perplexity reproduced full articles verbatim, including paywalled content CNN charges subscribers to read. It also accuses Perplexity of attaching CNN's name to made-up information its AI generated, creating a false impression that CNN reported something it never did. That is a trademark claim layered on top of the copyright one.
What makes the timeline notable is that CNN and Perplexity were in active licensing negotiations in late 2024. Those talks broke down in November. After the deal collapsed, Perplexity continued using CNN's content despite written legal warnings. Perplexity never responded. That sequence matters in court: it removes any argument that the company simply did not know it was doing something the rights-holder objected to.
Perplexity's public response has been dismissive. Its chief communications officer said "you can't copyright facts" in reply to CNN's filing. That framing sidesteps the actual allegation, which is not about facts but about copying full articles, including paywalled ones, word for word.
CNN joins a long list of publishers that have taken legal action against Perplexity. News Corp and its Dow Jones titles, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Encyclopedia Britannica, Reddit, and Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun have all filed or are pursuing suits. The cases are at different stages, and the full picture is still developing as new filings arrive. What is clear is that this is not a fringe movement by one or two aggrieved parties.
At the same time, other publishers have taken a different approach. Gannett, Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, and The Independent joined Perplexity's revenue-sharing program, called Comet Plus, which has a reported pool of $42.5 million set aside for participating publishers. That is a meaningful sum for a small publisher, but it looks modest compared to what the larger AI companies are paying. OpenAI's deal with News Corp is reportedly worth up to $250 million over five years, and OpenAI has been reported to offer some news organizations between $1 million and $5 million per year for content rights.
Perplexity's reported valuation sits near $20 billion, with annualized revenue of around $148 million to $200 million by late 2025, according to press and analyst reports. Those are estimates, not audited figures, but they give a sense of scale. The company has the financial capacity to license content; the question is whether court pressure will make it the cheaper option compared to continued litigation.
For context on where this legal environment is heading, Anthropic settled a class-action copyright lawsuit from authors in August 2025 for $1.5 billion: the largest copyright settlement in US history. That case was specifically about Anthropic using pirated books to train its AI, which is a different fact pattern from Perplexity's alleged real-time scraping of news articles. The two situations are not directly comparable, but both point in the same direction: courts are building a track record that AI companies must account for when they use copyrighted material without agreement.
For anyone whose business produces content, reports, research, or documentation, the practical takeaway is this. AI tools are already ingesting and redistributing that material, and the legal framework around it is becoming clearer over time. For anyone using Perplexity or similar AI search tools, the product works today. What is worth watching is that the cost structure behind it, currently light on licensing fees, is the thing courts and publishers are actively working to change.