In a letter to Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, the BBC claims it has gathered evidence that Perplexity's product is reproducing BBC content "verbatim" without permission, constituting copyright infringement and breaching the corporation's terms of use. The BBC demands Perplexity immediately stop using its content, delete any stored material, and provide financial compensation for the content currently in use.

The broadcaster cited its own research showing Perplexity and other AI chatbots were inaccurately summarizing BBC news stories. According to the BBC, Perplexity's AI-generated summaries of BBC content failed to meet the standards set by the BBC Editorial Guidelines for the publication of impartial and accurate news. The BBC argues this could potentially damage its reputation with UK license fee payers.

The legal threat highlights growing tensions over AI companies' web scraping practices. Despite the BBC using "robots.txt" files to block automated data extraction, the corporation claims Perplexity isn't respecting these instructions. This is not the first time Perplexity has been called out for its unethical scraping practices. Just a year ago, Forbes published an investigation into Perplexity's practices, showing the startup's product plagiarized content by outputting posts that were both poorly attributed and uncannily similar to the source material.

The BBC is also not the first media publisher to sue the AI startup. In October last year, News Corp's Dow Jones and The New York Post filed a lawsuit against Perplexity, citing the latter's engagement in copyright violations on a "massive scale". On a similar note, The New York Times issued Perplexity a cease-and-desist notice demanding that the startup stop using the newspaper's material for content generation purposes.

Perplexity responded dismissively, calling the BBC's claims "overwhelming evidence that the BBC will do anything to preserve Google's illegal monopoly"—a statement that left the connection to Google unexplained. Perplexity also has a history of deflective and largely dismissive responses against accusations of wrongdoing. When Forbes and WIRED accused the startup of unethical scraping, Perplexity simply offloaded the responsibility to someone else: the startup claimed it outsourced part of its scraping needs to a third party and that it had no control over how said party conducted its web scraping practices.

Likewise, when the startup was sued by Dow Jones and The New York Post, it published a blog post filled with grandiose and mostly ungrounded claims, including that media companies were complaining because they wished generative AI didn’t exist.