The New York Times

A December 2025 lawsuit against Perplexity extended The New York Times’ push to assert copyright control over AI use of its reporting.

Who they are

The New York Times appears in this coverage both as a major news publisher producing consequential reporting on technology companies and as a media company defending that reporting’s value. Its stories surface in coverage of Apple, Google, Uber, Threads, TikTok and AI, while its own corporate actions are especially prominent in disputes over generative-AI training and use of publisher content.

The recent arc

The recent coverage shifted decisively toward AI-era copyright enforcement. The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, alleging the companies trained on millions of its articles; OpenAI’s January 2024 response argued training was fair use and challenged the paper’s examples. By December 2025, the Times had also sued Perplexity, alleging continued use of its content despite repeated demands, while a federal judge ordered OpenAI to produce 20 million anonymized ChatGPT logs in the broader litigation.

The tension

The central tension is between the Times’ role as a producer of valuable original reporting and AI companies’ claims that model training and outputs can be lawful or technically exceptional. That conflict now spans OpenAI, Microsoft and Perplexity, and sits alongside scrutiny of the paper’s own digital practices: an analysis of an NYT article described 422 network requests, 49MB transferred and a sprawling programmatic ad auction as “hostile architecture.”

Why it matters

If this trajectory holds, the Times’ litigation will help test whether major publishers can set enforceable limits or secure compensation for AI systems’ use of newsroom archives. The outcome is uncertain, but the expansion from OpenAI and Microsoft to Perplexity shows that the issue is not confined to model training alone; it also reaches AI products that retrieve, summarize or otherwise rely on reporting.

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