The lawsuit follows a failed licensing negotiation. In October 2025, the parties discussed a partnership that would have granted Perplexity access to CNN's paywalled content for Comet Plus subscribers in exchange for compensation. When those talks collapsed in November, CNN blocked Perplexity's crawler from its site and sent a cease-and-desist letter in December demanding the company stop using CNN's name and content. Perplexity's stated position is that facts cannot be copyrighted—a defense the company has deployed in similar disputes with The New York Times, News Corp., the Chicago Tribune, and Britannica. This is CNN's first lawsuit against an AI company.
Attorneys should monitor how courts treat the scope of copyright protection for news content when AI systems are trained on and retrieve published material at scale. The case directly tests whether licensing negotiations and access restrictions create enforceable rights when an AI company has already ingested the content. The outcome will likely influence how publishers structure access controls and licensing terms with AI platforms going forward.