Overview
- CNN filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York after talks with Perplexity failed and CNN blocked the company’s crawlers, according to the complaint.
- The complaint, filed on May 28, 2026, alleges Perplexity scraped more than 17,000 CNN stories, photos and videos and used that material as input to its large language models.
- CNN also accuses Perplexity of trademark misuse by implying a partnership through Perplexity’s Comet Plus messaging that promised access to CNN premium content when no such deal existed.
- The network is asking the court for statutory damages and an injunction ordering Perplexity to stop using CNN content and trademarks.
- The case joins multiple suits from major publishers and could shape whether commercial AI answer engines must license newsroom reporting or face legal limits on scraping and reproduction.