Active Last verified: Apr 25, 2026

Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. v. Perplexity AI, Inc.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. and Merriam-Webster, Inc. sued Perplexity AI, Inc. in the Southern District of New York, alleging Perplexity copied their copyrighted content from websites to train and operate its AI answer engine and falsely attributed AI-generated or hallucinated outputs to their brands.[1][2][3][4] The complaint asserts copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 106 for scraping, input use, and substantially similar outputs in Perplexity's Retrieval Augmented Generation system, plus false designation of origin and trademark dilution under the Lanham Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1125; Perplexity moved to dismiss, arguing engineered prompts and unidentified works cannot support the claims.[3][4][7] Filed September 10, 2025, this is the 51st U.S. copyright lawsuit against an AI company an

🏛️ SDNY· Case No. 1:25-cv-07546· Filed Sep 10, 2025

Summary

Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. and Merriam-Webster, Inc. sued Perplexity AI, Inc. in the Southern District of New York, alleging Perplexity copied their copyrighted content from websites to train and operate its AI answer engine and falsely attributed AI-generated or hallucinated outputs to their brands.[1][2][3][4] The complaint asserts copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 106 for scraping, input use, and substantially similar outputs in Perplexity's Retrieval Augmented Generation system, plus false designation of origin and trademark dilution under the Lanham Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1125; Perplexity moved to dismiss, arguing engineered prompts and unidentified works cannot support the claims.[3][4][7] Filed September 10, 2025, this is the 51st U.S. copyright lawsuit against an AI company an

Case details

Court
SDNY
Docket number
1:25-cv-07546
Filed
Sep 10, 2025
Status
Active

This case was added to AI Lawsuit Tracker via our automated docket monitoring. Multiple verification gates and an LLM relevance check confirmed it as AI/ML-related before publishing. How we keep it accurate →

Spotted an error? corrections@ailawsuittracker.com

More cases against Perplexity

See all →
Amazon.com Services, LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc.
9th Cir. ·Filed Mar 11, 2026
Active
The New York Times Company v. Perplexity AI, Inc.
SDNY ·Filed Dec 5, 2025
Active
Chicago Tribune Company, LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc.
SDNY ·Filed Dec 4, 2025
Active
Amazon.com Services LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc.
NDCA ·Filed Nov 4, 2025
Active