Multiple Active Copyright Lawsuits from Major Publishers (critical) Perplexity is facing a wave of active, high-profile copyright infringement lawsuits globally. Key plaintiffs include: Dow Jones/NYP Holdings (News Corp, lawsuit filed Oct 21, 2024, alleging unlawful scraping and plagiarism of WSJ/NY Post content; Perplexity lost its bid to dismiss the case on Aug 21, 2025). Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster (sued Sep 10/11/12, 2025, alleging verbatim copying, trademark violation, and 'free riding'). Japanese media groups Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun (filed joint lawsuit Aug 26, 2025, seeking ¥2.2 billion ($15 million) each, alleging content storage and ignoring technical safeguards).. Alleged Bypassing of Robots.txt and Stealth Scraping (critical) Cloudflare reported that Perplexity's AI bots are allegedly bypassing standard web restrictions (robots.txt) by disguising their identity to scrape content from sites that opted out of crawling. This practice is cited as a significant ethical and operational concern and is included in the lawsuit filed by Nikkei and Asahi Shimbun.. Amazon Web Services (AWS) Investigation over Data Scraping (high) Amazon is actively investigating Perplexity AI over potential data-scraping violations. This investigation suggests concerns regarding Perplexity's use of AWS resources for unauthorized data collection or model training.. Trademark Violation via AI Hallucinations (high) Multiple lawsuits (Britannica, Nikkei/Asahi) allege that Perplexity's AI sometimes generates incorrect or false information ('hallucinations') and then falsely attributes these errors to the original publishers, leading to trademark dilution and tarnishing the publishers' famous marks and credibility.. CEO Forced to Publicly Deny Financial Instability Rumors (medium) In March/April 2025, CEO Aravind Srinivas had to take to Reddit to publicly deny 'user theories' and 'rumors of financial bottlenecks' suggesting the company was 'in terrible financial shape' and making cost-cutting changes (e.g., product changes like Auto mode). The need for a public denial indicates significant market speculation regarding the company's financial sustainability.