The New York Times has issued a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity, an AI startup backed by Jeff Bezos, demanding that the company stop using its content without authorization. The newspaper alleges that Perplexity’s AI is citing its articles without permission and wants to know how and why this is happening. The letter, dated Oct. 2, gives Perplexity until Oct. 30 to respond. The Wall Street Journal first reported on the letter on Tuesday. A spokesperson for The New York Times declined to comment further.

In the letter, The New York Times accuses Perplexity of unlawfully using its carefully written and researched journalism for its own financial gain. The newspaper also claims that Perplexity has circumvented its anti-scraping and anti-bot measures, including its robots.txt page which specifically disallows PerplexityBot. However, it is unclear if Perplexity uses other bots or methods to scrape content from the outlet.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has stated that the company is willing to collaborate with The New York Times and has no interest in being an antagonist. A Perplexity representative also stated that the company will respond to the letter by the deadline and that they believe in transparency and have a public page on their website that clarifies their content policies.

However, this is not the first time Perplexity has faced backlash from news outlets. Condé Nast, which owns publications such as Wired and Vogue, previously sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity for allegedly scraping their sites and using the content for financial gain. Forbes has also accused Perplexity of theft and creating “knockoff stories” based on their articles.

While Perplexity claims to respect robots.txt and not violate any terms of service, some tech and AI firms have argued that scraping any site constitutes “fair use.” However, this has yet to be proven in court. The use of copyrighted content by AI companies has become a contentious issue, with some warning that these firms are running out of text to train their chatbots.

In conclusion, The New York Times is demanding that Perplexity stop using its content without authorization and is giving the company a deadline to respond. Other news outlets have also accused Perplexity of scraping their content for financial gain. The issue of using copyrighted content for AI training purposes is a contentious one and has yet to be resolved.