Perplexity sued by Japanese media giants for stealing information and presenting false information

Japanese media giants Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun are suing Perplexity, an AI company, for allegedly copying and storing their article content without permission. The media groups claim Perplexity supplied inaccurate information and credited these falsehoods to the companies, potentially undermining the foundation of journalism. Each company is seeking 2.2 billion yen ($15 million) in damages and for Perplexity to remove any stored articles. This lawsuit comes just a day after Perplexity announced a new revenue-sharing plan for publishers, where a $5 per month subscription would give users "premium content from a group of trusted publishers and journalists." However, the plan would only pay publishers $4 per subscriber, a significant decrease from the $20 to $30 many newspapers charge. This is not the first time Perplexity has been accused of raking websites' content without permission. Previous reports have alleged that Perplexity has deployed web crawlers to bypass robots.txt files and firewalls, and has been scraping content from various publications, including Forbes and Condé Nast-owned publications.