BBC Threatens Legal Action Against AI Firm Perplexity Over Content Scraping
The BBC is threatening legal action against AI startup Perplexity, accusing the company of scraping and using its content without permission to train its AI models. In a letter to Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, the broadcaster demands that the San Francisco-based firm stop using BBC material, delete existing copies, and propose financial compensation. The BBC claims its content has been reproduced "verbatim," with some AI-generated results containing factual errors and lacking proper context.
Perplexity, backed by major investors like Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and SoftBank, fired back, calling the BBC’s accusations "manipulative and opportunistic" and arguing that the broadcaster "has a fundamental misunderstanding of technology, the internet and intellectual property law." While Perplexity says it doesn’t build foundation models and sources information from the web, the BBC alleges the company ignored robots.txt files meant to block automated data scraping.
This is the BBC's first legal move against an AI company, but Perplexity is already facing similar disputes with media giants like The New York Times, Dow Jones, and Condé Nast. Despite the controversies, Perplexity is reportedly close to securing a $14 billion valuation, highlighting the growing tensions between AI firms and content creators over the use of copyrighted material.
