BBC threatens Perplexity with legal action over unauthorized use of news content

The BBC has threatened legal action against a US-based artificial intelligence company, Perplexity, accusing it of reproducing BBC news content "verbatim" without authorisation.

In a formal notice, the British media giant demanded Perplexity immediately cease using any BBC material, erase existing content, and offer compensation for what has already been utilised.

This marks the first instance in which the BBC — one of the world’s most prominent news providers — has initiated legal proceedings against an AI firm.

Perplexity responded with a statement asserting: “The BBC's claims are just one more part of the overwhelming evidence that the BBC will do anything to preserve Google's illegal monopoly.” However, it offered no explanation for why it believes Google is relevant to the dispute with the BBC, and made no additional comment.

The BBC’s legal complaint was addressed to Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. “This constitutes copyright infringement in the UK and breach of the BBC's terms of use,” the letter reads.

The broadcaster also cited internal research released earlier this year that found four widely used AI chatbots — including Perplexity AI — were frequently misrepresenting or inaccurately summarising BBC content.

Highlighting several instances in which Perplexity’s responses distorted BBC news stories, the broadcaster argued that the chatbot’s output failed to uphold the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines on impartiality and accuracy.

“This is highly damaging to the BBC, harming its reputation with audiences — including UK licence fee payers who fund the BBC — and undermining public trust,” the letter continued.

Rising concerns over web scraping

AI tools like chatbots and image generators, capable of producing content within seconds from simple prompts, have exploded in popularity since OpenAI’s ChatGPT launch in late 2022. Their rapid expansion has raised concerns around the use of pre-existing content — including copyrighted works — without consent or compensation. Much of the data powering generative AI tools is obtained via large-scale web scraping, which involves bots and crawlers systematically harvesting site content.

This surge in web scraping has sparked growing unease among British media organisations and creators, many of whom are urging the UK government to strengthen protections for intellectual property.

Following the BBC’s legal notice, the Professional Publishers Association (PPA), representing over 300 UK-based media brands, voiced its support, stating it is “deeply concerned that AI platforms are currently failing to uphold UK copyright law.” It warned that bots are “illegally scraping publishers’ content to train their models without permission or payment.” The PPA further stated that such practices pose a direct threat to the UK’s £4.4 billion publishing sector and the 55,000 jobs it supports.

Organisations such as the BBC attempt to block unauthorised scraping through a standard web file called “robots.txt.” This file signals to bots which areas of a website should not be accessed or indexed. However, adherence to these directives is voluntary, and reports suggest that not all bots comply.

The BBC, in its letter, noted that it had blocked two of Perplexity’s known web crawlers, but claimed the firm had disregarded those restrictions: “The company is clearly not respecting robots.txt.”

According to the BBC reporting, Srinivas rejected the suggestion in a June 2023 interview that Perplexity’s bots had ignored such directives. The company also stated that because it does not create foundational AI models from scratch, it does not rely on scraped content for pre-training its technology.

By Nazrin Sadigova