AI search outfit Perplexity has been hit with yet another copyright lawsuit, this time courtesy of Japan's Nikkei and Asahi media companies.

Nikkei and Asahi [1]filed their joint suit on Tuesday in Tokyo District Court, claiming that the Google challenger unlawfully scraped their articles and repeatedly served up the content in response to user queries.

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine [2]READ MORE

They allege Perplexity ignored their robots.txt files to do so, echoing [3]accusations leveled against the company earlier this month by Cloudflare. On that occasion, Perplexity [4]insisted that overriding such crawler-blocking preferences was acceptable as long as the user is directing the search query that triggers the information retrieval.

The company has not yet responded to the new suit, which seeks an injunction and damages of ¥2.2 billion ($15 million) per media firm. However, a few weeks ago, it responded to a similar suit by Japan's Yomiuri newspaper, with the [5]claim that its practices had led to a "misunderstanding" in Japan.

Japanese [6]copyright law doesn't stop AI companies from freely training their models on copyrighted material, but it draws the line at wholly reproducing that content and interfering with the publishers' right of distribution, both of which are central claims in the Yomiuri and Nikkei/Asahi suits.

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The newest filing also alleges that Perplexity violated the media companies' exclusive right to adapt their own content, and accuses the firm of citing Nikkei and Asahi as the sources of "a large amount of incorrect information that differs from the actual article content," thus allegedly maligning the outlets and breaking Japanese competition law.

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Copyright is an increasingly fraught issue for Perplexity, which has been on the receiving end of cease-and-desist letters from the New York Times, the BBC, and Condé Nast. On Thursday, the company [10]lost its bid to have a News Corp copyright suit dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. Days later, it [11]announced that it would give participating publishers a cut of the subscription fee for its new Comet Plus service, which gives subscribers "direct access" to those publishers' sites and content.

[12]xAI fires legal rocket at Apple and OpenAI claiming they're locking out Grok

[13]AI crawlers and fetchers are blowing up websites, with Meta and OpenAI the worst offenders

[14]Perplexity's Comet browser naively processed pages with evil instructions

[15]Perplexity takes a shine to Chrome, offers Google $34.5 billion

Perplexity first [16]announced partnerships with media companies last July, promising to give them a cut of the revenue it earns when brands pay for the placement of follow-up questions that are answered by referencing the companies' articles. The new Comet Plus arrangement is calculated according to "human visits, search citations, and agent actions," Perplexity said on Monday.

"The revenue allocation recognizes the reality that users now choose how they want to consume information: browsing manually, asking for AI-generated answers, or deploying agents for complex tasks," it added. "Publishers deserve compensation that matches this new reality."

The big question is whether the scale of this compensation will provide any useful counterweight to the drastic drop-off in traffic that publishers are currently experiencing, largely thanks to AI-generated answers that [17]reduce the likelihood of readers clicking through to articles.

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Google's AI Overviews in particular have been linked to traffic declines of [19]up to 25 percent , with outlets such as Business Insider and Fortune instituting mass layoffs in response to the collapse of organic search traffic. ®

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[1] https://www.nikkei.co.jp/nikkeiinfo/en/news/release_en_20250826_01.pdf

[2] https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/16/opinion_column_perplexity_vs_google/

[3] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/04/perplexity_ai_crawlers_accused_data_raids/

[4] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/05/perplexity_vexed_by_cloudflares_claims/

[5] https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/society/crime-courts/20250810-274484/

[6] https://www.cric.or.jp/english/clj/cl2.html

[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aK3aHTAeBIxAZGLNCQRxzQAAAFc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aK3aHTAeBIxAZGLNCQRxzQAAAFc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aK3aHTAeBIxAZGLNCQRxzQAAAFc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[10] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/perplexity-ai-loses-bid-dismiss-or-transfer-news-corp-copyright-case-2025-08-21/

[11] https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/introducing-comet-plus

[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/25/xai_apple_openai_lawsuit/

[13] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/ai_crawler_traffic/

[14] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/20/perplexity_comet_browser_prompt_injection/

[15] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/12/perplexity_takes_shine_to_chrome/

[16] https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/introducing-the-perplexity-publishers-program

[17] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/22/google_ai_overviews_suppress_search/

[18] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aK3aHTAeBIxAZGLNCQRxzQAAAFc&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[19] https://digiday.com/media/google-ai-overviews-linked-to-25-drop-in-publisher-referral-traffic-new-data-shows/

[20] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/