Dec 5 (Reuters) - AI search startup Perplexity said on

Thursday it was adding more than a dozen new media partners,

including the Los Angeles Times and The Independent, to its

program where it shares a portion of ad revenue with the

publishers.

In its first set of partners from regions including Japan,

Spain and Latin America, Perplexity said companies such as Prisa

Media and Newspicks will now be part of the publishers' program,

joining existing partners like TIME, Der Spiegel and Fortune.

"With these new partners ... (Perplexity can) provide

insights that resonate with users from different backgrounds and

geographies. Their participation ensures that our responses to

user queries remain comprehensive (and) nuanced," Perplexity

said in a statement.

The firm, backed by Amazon ( AMZN ) founder Jeff Bezos and

leading AI chipmaker Nvidia ( NVDA ), launched the program in

July, which involves sharing ad revenue from interactions when a

publisher's content is referenced.

The program also gives publishers access to Perplexity's

Application Programming Interface, or API, which allows software

programs to interact with each other, and also provides data

analytics to track trends and content performance.

The move comes at a time when Perplexity is in a legal

tussle with News Corp ( NWSA )-owned publishers, with Dow Jones

and New York Post suing the company in October, claiming it

engages in a "massive amount of illegal copying" of their

copyrighted work.

New York Times ( NYT ) has also sent Perplexity a "cease and

desist" notice, demanding it stop using the newspaper's content

for generative AI purposes.

Perplexity, one of the firms attempting to disrupt the

search engine market dominated by Alphabet's Google,

has started testing advertising on its AI-powered search

platform.