BBC threatens legal action against AI startup Perplexity over content scraping, FT reports

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(Reuters) -The BBC has threatened legal action against Perplexity, accusing the AI startup of training its “default AI model” using BBC content, the Financial Times reported on Friday, making the British broadcaster the latest news organisation to accuse the AI firm of content scraping.

The BBC may seek an injunction unless Perplexity stops scraping its content, deletes existing copies used to train its AI systems, and submits “a proposal for financial compensation” for the alleged misuse of its intellectual property, FT said, citing a letter sent to Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas.

The broadcaster confirmed the FT report in a statement to Reuters.

Perplexity has faced accusations from media organizations, including Forbes and Wired, for plagiarizing their content but has since launched a revenue-sharing program to address publisher concerns.

Last October, the New York Times sent it a “cease and desist” notice, demanding the firm stop using the newspaper’s content for generative AI purposes.

Since the introduction of ChatGPT, publishers have raised alarms about chatbots that comb the internet to find information and create paragraph summaries for users.

The BBC said that parts of its content had been reproduced verbatim by Perplexity and that links to the BBC website have appeared in search results, according to the FT report.

Perplexity called the BBC’s claims “manipulative and opportunistic” in a statement to Reuters, adding that the broadcaster had “a fundamental misunderstanding of technology, the internet and intellectual property law.”

Perplexity provides information by searching the internet, similar to ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, and is backed by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, AI giant Nvidia and Japan’s SoftBank Group.

The startup is in advanced talks to raise $500 million in a funding round that would value it at $14 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported last month.

(Reporting by Devika Nair and Gursimran Kaur Mehar; Additional reporting by Kanjyik Ghosh in Bengaluru; Editing by Sonia Cheema and Tasim Zahid)