CNN is the latest media company to sue Perplexity

The lawsuit, which was filed Thursday, claims that the AI company unlawfully crawls, scrapes, copies, and distributes CNN's content from CNN Digital Platforms and third-party platforms. It also accuses the AI tools of reproducing verbatim copies of its articles, including paywalled stories, in query responses to users. Perplexity's AI tools allegedly have incorrectly attributed hallucinated content to CNN, which the company says in the suit violates its trademark. 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 to the outlet. The public rely on high quality news journalism reported by human beings to understand their world, which is frequently dangerous and expensive to produce.