Legal Threats, Google Competition Loom Over Perplexity’s ‘Newbie CEO’

Aravind Srinivas didn’t set out to earn a reputation as one of the media’s biggest tech villains. It just kind of happened.

Over the summer, Forbes and Wired angrily accused Srinivas’ AI search startup, Perplexity, of plagiarizing their paywalled content. In one case, Perplexity had lifted portions of a Forbes story and used it in a new product that summarizes news stories. In the other instance, a Wired reporter found that Perplexity’s search engine tried to pass off Wired content as its own when that reporter asked the search engine to summarize a Wired story.

Then, last week, The New York Times Co. sent Srinivas a cease-and-desist letter demanding that Perplexity stop using its content for its AI-powered search engine. And days ago News Corp, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, filed its own copyright-infringement lawsuit demanding that Srinivas’ startup keep its hands off the media company’s stories.

Srinivas wouldn’t comment on the latest salvos from The Times and News Corp, but when I brought up the Forbes and Wired drama with him a few weeks ago, he pleaded youthful ignorance. “I’m a newbie CEO trying to learn here,” said Srinivas, 30, who is both Perplexity’s CEO and its co-founder. “I underestimated how important people take us, to be honest. I was still thinking we are a product that most people don’t even know or care about. So all that attention was very new to me.”