The Chicago Tribune filed a lawsuit against AI search engine Perplexity on Thursday alleging copyright infringement. The suit, seen by TechCrunch, was filed in a federal court in New York.

The Tribune alleges that its lawyers contacted Perplexity in mid-October asking if the AI search engine was using its content, according to the complaint. Perplexity’s lawyers replied it did not train models with the Tribune’s work, but that it “may receive non-verbatim factual summaries,” the lawsuit claims.

The Tribune’s lawyers, however, argue that Perplexity is delivering Tribune content verbatim.

Interestingly, the newspaper’s lawyers are also calling out Perplexity’s Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) as a culprit. RAG is a method used to limit hallucinations by having the model only use an

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