Buzzy AI Search Engine Perplexity Is Directly Ripping Off Content From News Outlets

AI-powered search startup Perplexity appears to be plagiarizing journalists’ work through its newly launched feature, Perplexity Pages, which lets people curate content on a particular topic. Multiple posts that have been “curated” by the Perplexity team on its platform are strikingly similar to original stories from multiple publications, including Forbes, CNBC and Bloomberg. The posts, which have already gathered tens of thousands of views, do not mention the publications by name in the article text — the only attributions are small, easy-to-miss logos that link out to them.

For instance, a Perplexity aggregation of Forbes’ exclusive reporting on Eric Schmidt’s stealth drone project contains several fragments that appear to have been lifted, including a custom illustration. Over the past several months, Forbes has broken a series of stories on the former Google CEO’s secretive efforts to develop AI-guided aircraft for the battlefield, and this week reported that Schmidt had poached talent from SpaceX, Apple and Google, and has been testing his drones in the wealthy Silicon Valley town of Menlo Park.

Portions of the post contain nearly identical wording and it includes all of the details first reported by Forbes. The only attribution is a small, barely identifiable Forbes logo as a citation. The Perplexity aggregation also includes an image created by the Forbes design team that looks to be slightly modified by Perplexity. Perplexity’s aggregated blog was the top item on its Discover tab and has more than 17,000 views.

A Perplexity post with over 20,000 views about Elon Musk routing chips from Tesla to xAI was originally a CNBC exclusive, but CNBC was not named in the post and is one of four outlets signaled through a small circular stamp.

“Emails circulated inside Nvidia and obtained by CNBC show that Elon Musk told the chipmaker to prioritize shipments of processors to X and xAI ahead of Tesla,” the story reads. Perplexity’s version? “Emails from Nvidia reveal that Elon Musk instructed the company to prioritize shipments of 12,000 H100 GPUs to X and xAI.”

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman first reported that Apple is exploring working on home robots. Perplexity’s Pages said Apple plans “the development of two home robotics projects: a mobile robot that follows users around their homes and a tabletop device with a display that moves autonomously.” It was the same information that Gurman had reported from “people, who asked not to be identified because the skunk-works project is private.” In this case, Bloomberg’s logo was hidden behind three others, invisible to Perplexity’s users unless they clicked.

In response to tweets about the issue from Forbes Executive Editor John Paczkowski, CEO Aravind Srinivas said on X that the Perplexity Pages has “rough edges” and that the features will improve with time and feedback.

“We agree that contributing sources should be highlighted more prominently on Pages and will take that feedback into account as we continue to iterate on the product. We have always cared about giving attribution to content and have designed our product from the beginning to clearly cite its source materials, which most other chatbots are unable to do reliably and prominently even today,” Srinivas said in response to a comment request.

CNBC, Bloomberg and Forbes’ PR team did not immediately respond to a comment request.

The feature also allows people to easily share content directly to social media platforms like LinkedIn and provides a link to the Perplexity’s aggregated article, making it easier for its users to link back to the Perplexity source instead of news outlets.

When Perplexity’s search engine was prompted to give its opinion on stealing reporting and failing to properly attribute to the publication and journalists work, its AI said that it was unethical for Perplexity to reproduce journalists’ reporting without properly attributing.

“While AI assistants can summarize and synthesize information, they must do so ethically by respecting intellectual property rights, crediting original sources fully and transparently, and upholding journalistic integrity,” the search engine responded. “Perplexity AI’s approach appears to violate these principles.”

In May 2024, Perplexity launched Pages as a new way for its 15 million users to create visually appealing articles and detailed reports on topics of interest, broken down into subsections. “Publish your work to our growing library of user-generated content and share it directly with your audience with a single click,” the company said in a blog post. In these cases, however, the pages appear to have been generated in-house by Perplexity’s own team, not by users.

Cofounded by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andrew Konwinski in 2022, the buzzy AI unicorn has raised over $100 million in venture capital from the who’s who in tech including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, Open AI cofounder Andrej Karpathy and Meta Chief Scientist Yann LeCun. It’s now raising $250 million at a $2.5 billion to $3 billion valuation, according to TechCrunch.

“The web is free to crawl for anybody. It’s fair use,” CEO Srinivas told Forbes in an interview in April, emphasizing that his AI search platform provides links to sources after every sentence generated by its AI and that it was among the first to do so. “Take journalism where you’re writing a new article. What do you do, you say according to the New York Times, you cite others. That’s what we are also doing.”