Forbes has threatened legal action against Perplexity AI, an AI search startup, accusing the company of willful infringement of Forbes’ copyright rights. The dispute arose when Forbes’ chief content officer, Randall Lane, accused Perplexity AI’s chatbot of using Forbes’ reporting without proper attribution. The chatbot presented a Forbes story, citing other “sourced” reports that were actually aggregated stories of Forbes’ original report.
Perplexity then sent a push notification to its subscribers of its version of the story and published an AI-generated podcast, which was then turned into a YouTube video, about the story. That video, Lane said, “outranks all Forbes content on this topic within Google search.”
In response to the accusations, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas defended the company’s practices, stating that the incident was part of a new product feature that has “rough edges” and is being improved “with more feedback.” He agreed that it should be easier to find the contributing sources and highlight them more prominently.
The letter from Forbes demanded that Perplexity remove the misleading source articles, reimburse Forbes for all advertising revenues earned via the infringement, and provide “satisfactory evidence and written assurances” that it has removed the infringing articles. It also demanded that Perplexity confirm that it won’t use any of Forbes’ intellectual property or content to generate and publish AI chatbot articles and that it won’t infringe on Forbes copyrights in the future. Forbes said “it looks forward to a reply” to its letter within 10 days of receipt. It threatened to reserve “all of its rights to take any action it deems necessary to protect its rights.”
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