TLDR: AI search engine Perplexity has introduced ‘Comet Plus,’ a new subscription model designed to share revenue with news publishers for content used in AI-generated answers, allocating an initial $42.5 million. This move comes as the company faces increasing scrutiny and legal challenges, including accusations of stealth data scraping by Cloudflare and copyright infringement lawsuits from major Japanese news organizations.
Perplexity, an artificial intelligence-powered search engine, is making significant strides to address concerns from content creators by launching a new revenue-sharing initiative called ‘Comet Plus.’ This subscription tier aims to compensate news publishers when their articles are utilized to fulfill AI queries or generate summaries. The company has initially earmarked a substantial $42.5 million for this partner program, with plans to distribute 80% of Comet Plus’s subscription revenue to participating publishers.
Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity’s head of communications, emphasized the company’s commitment to a fair ecosystem, stating, ‘The right business model for the AI age should ensure publishers and journalists benefit from improving the internet.’ Publishers are set to receive compensation through three distinct mechanisms: direct human visits to their sites via Perplexity, citations of their content within AI summaries, and instances where Perplexity’s AI agents visit publisher websites to perform tasks on behalf of users.
However, these proactive steps towards compensation are unfolding against a backdrop of controversy regarding Perplexity’s data acquisition practices. Cloudflare, a network infrastructure company, recently accused Perplexity of engaging in ‘stealth data scraping.’ According to Cloudflare engineers, Perplexity’s bots have been observed ignoring `robots.txt` directives—a standard protocol for websites to communicate crawling preferences—and attempting to obscure their identity to circumvent blocking measures. These disguised bots reportedly impersonated generic browsers, such as Google Chrome on macOS, and made millions of site data requests daily from IP addresses outside Perplexity’s official range.
Further escalating the legal pressures, two prominent Japanese media companies, Nikkei and the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, have filed copyright infringement lawsuits against Perplexity. The publishers allege that Perplexity ‘copied and stored article content from the servers of Nikkei and Asahi’ without consent and bypassed technical measures designed to prevent such actions. They are seeking damages totaling 2.2 billion yen (approximately $15 million) and demand the deletion of the stored articles. The Japanese news groups contend that Perplexity’s actions constitute ‘large-scale, ongoing ‘free riding’ on article content that journalists from both companies have spent immense time and effort to research and write, while Perplexity pays no compensation.’ They warn that ‘If left unchecked, this situation could undermine the foundation of journalism, which is committed to conveying facts accurately.’
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These developments highlight the ongoing tension between AI developers and content creators over intellectual property rights and fair compensation in the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence landscape. While Perplexity’s new revenue-sharing model signals an attempt to foster positive relationships with publishers, the accusations of illicit scraping and copyright infringement underscore the complex challenges and legal battles that continue to shape the future of AI and data utilization.
