Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster Sue AI Startup Perplexity for Copyright Infringement

news.law September 16, 2025

The San Francisco-based tech company Perplexity became the latest artificial intelligence firm to be sued for copyright infringement, with Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster accusing it of scraping and plagiarizing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted online articles to feed Perplexity’s “answer engine” chatbot.

Filed in Manhattan federal court late Wednesday evening, Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster accuse Perplexity in 55-page civil complaint of violating their copyrights both at the curation stage when it uses a software program called “PerplexityBot” to crawl and scrape their websites for Perplexity’s “answer engine,” and also at the input stage when it reproduces copyrighted articles that are responsive to user searches to prompt responses from its retrieval-augmented generation output of its large language model.