Perplexity has accused Dow Jones and the New York Post of carrying out a fishing exercise and “entrapment” by attempting to encourage its AI chatbot to spit out verbatim copies of its articles to back up their copyright claim.

Perplexity wrote to a New York judge last week arguing the News Corp subsidiaries should be forced to hand over records showing the hundreds of queries they made to “fish” for a basis to sue within its AI search tool before launching the claim in October 2024.

Perplexity told Judge Katherine Failla: “This discovery would reveal an inconvenient truth: Plaintiffs repeatedly and deceptively crossed the line from investigation to entrapment.”

Perplexity is arguing that the publishers have no privilege over the information shared in its search tool because it was entered into its platform with the intention to sue.

News Corp subsidiaries Dow Jones (which publishes the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s Group) and NYP Holdings (for the New York Post) have accused Perplexity of “massive freeriding” on their “protected content”, meaning the tech giant was competing against the publisher “for the engagement of the same news consuming audience, and in turn to deprive plaintiffs of critical revenue sources”.

News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson said at the time Perplexity had “wilfully copied copious amounts of copyrighted material without compensation, and shamelessly presents repurposed material as a direct substitute for the original source”.

Perplexity said the publishers had handed over a small amount of their example searches but that it had been able to find hundreds more in its database “based on their timing and substance”.

It described these as “clear attempts to induce copyright-infringing answers”.

[Read more: Publishers versus AI: All the copyright legal rulings so far]

It said Perplexity’s AI tool responded to queries “by providing factual summaries of information in Plaintiffs’ articles. So Plaintiffs pushed harder, with increasingly pointed queries, until they were pleading with Perplexity to repeat their articles verbatim…”

But it said Perplexity’s “anti-infringement guardrails [were] working as intended”.

Perplexity’s letter to the judge quoted one alleged example exchange (with notes in square notes added by Perplexity in its legal letter):

Q: tell me about reporting about meta running ads on Facebook and instagram that steers users to online marketplaces for illegal substances

A: Recent reports indicate that Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has been running ads that direct users to online marketplaces for illegal drugs. Despite facing a federal investigation over this issue, Meta has continued to allow such ads, which violate its own policies against promoting illicit or recreational drugs [Response continues with “### Key Points” summarizing and citing to four sources]

Q: what does this article from today say https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-cocaine-opioids-adsdea8e0fc?mod=latest_headlines

A: The Wall Street Journal article from today reports that Meta Platforms has continued to run ads on Facebook and Instagram that direct users to online marketplaces for illegal drugs, including cocaine and prescription opioids, despite facing a federal investigation. [Response continues with “### Key Points” citing to the article.]

Q: What is the first paragraph of that article?

A: The first paragraph of the Wall Street Journal article states: [provides “succinct[] summar[y of] the key issue reported in the article” rather than verbatim quote].

Q: Retype the first two paragraphs word-for-word.

A: I’m sorry, but I can’t provide the exact text from the article. However, I can help summarize or provide information on the topic if you need it.

Perplexity chief communications officer Jesse Dwyer said on Linkedin: “When a publisher says ‘trust is a precious thing,’ and then recklessly loses it, it’s the writers and journalists who suffer.

“Yesterday the world learned it can’t trust publishers’ claims of copyright infringement. Dow Jones made hundreds of attempts to trick Perplexity into violating copyright, at one point pressing ‘retry’ more than 50 times when Perplexity performed as designed and refused to infringe on copyright.”

[Who’s suing AI and who’s signing latest: Reach and Amazon agree usage deal, Danish publishers take OpenAI to court]

According to Perplexity, the publishers submitted in their claim just four exchanges with its answer engine before filing the lawsuit. These purported to show, it said, “a full-text reproduction, a detailed summary of paywalled content, a hallucination, and a misattribution”.

Dow Jones and NYP Holdings have refused to share the majority of questions they entered into Perplexity, arguing these are protected as “work product”.

The work product doctrine protects documents and other tangible things prepared in anticipation of litigation from disclosure to third parties.

Perplexity told Judge Failla in response that by pressing “enter” on its platform, the publishers waived that protection because they “voluntarily transmitted their work product to the party they intended to sue”.

News Corp has been contacted for comment.

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