The BBC has written to the boss of Nvidia and Jeff Bezos-backed Perplexity AI, threatening legal action against the AI start-up.
The giant British new organisation and broadcaster alleged in a letter written to Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, that the Perplexity chatbot is reproducing BBC content “verbatim” without its permission. The BBC said it is the first time it has taken such action against an AI company.
But the BBC is not the only news publisher to take action against AI startups, over alleged misuse of its content, after a series of lawsuits in the United States over the past two years.
Copyright allegation
The BBC in its letter to Perplexity reportedly demanded that “it immediately stops using BBC content, deletes any it holds, and proposes financial compensation for the material it has already used.”
“This constitutes copyright infringement in the UK and breach of the BBC’s terms of use,” the letter reportedly says.
The BBC also cited its research from earlier this year that found four popular AI chatbots – including Perplexity AI – were inaccurately summarising news stories, including some BBC content.
Besides the Perplexity search-focused chatbot, the BBC in February had also cited OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Google’s Gemini as giving answers that contained “significant inaccuracies” and distortions.
In January 2025 Apple had suspended an AI feature that generated false headlines for BBC News app notifications when summarising groups of them for iPhones users, after a BBC complaint was made a month earlier.
Perplexity response
But Perplexity AI seems to have dismissed the concerns of the BBC about the alleged misuse of its material.
“The BBC’s claims are just one more part of the overwhelming evidence that the BBC will do anything to preserve Google’s illegal monopoly,” it was quoted by the BBC as stating, as its response to the copyright allegation.
Perplexity did not explain what it believed the relevance of Google was to the BBC’s position, or offer any further comment, the BBC reported.
Other lawsuits
Perplexity is one of a number of AI firms that have been challenged by news or music publishers for using their content without permission.
Perplexity itself was sued in October 2024 by News Corp over similar allegations.
The first high profile lawsuit of this kind however came in December 2023, when the New York Times became the first major US media organisation to sue OpenAI (and its main investor Microsoft).
Many other lawsuits against OpenAI by other news publishers around the world were also filed.
In August 2024 three authors sued Anthropic for copyright infringement, alleging the AI firm used their and other books to train Claude chatbot
