Oct 15 (Reuters) - The New York Times ( NYT ) has sent

Perplexity a "cease and desist" notice demanding the company

stop using the newspaper's content for generative AI purposes,

the startup said on Tuesday, marking the latest clash between

the news publisher and an AI firm.

The news publisher said in the letter, a copy of which it

shared with Reuters, that the way Perplexity was using its

content, including to create summaries and other types of

output, violates copyright law. NYT declined to provide

additional comment on the matter.

Since the introduction of ChatGPT, publishers have been

raising the alarm on chatbots that can comb the internet to find

information and create paragraph summaries for the user.

In the letter to Perplexity dated Oct. 2, NYT demanded the

AI firm "immediately cease and desist all current and future

unauthorized access and use of The Times's content."

It also asked Perplexity to provide information on how it is

accessing the publisher's website despite its prevention

efforts.

Perplexity had previously assured publishers it would stop

using "crawling" technology, according to the letter. Despite

this, NYT said its content still appears in Perplexity.

"We are not scraping data for building foundation models,

but rather indexing web pages and surfacing factual content as

citations to inform responses when a user asks a question,"

Perplexity told Reuters.

The startup also said it plans to respond by an Oct. 30

deadline set by NYT to provide the requested information.

NYT is also tussling with OpenAI, which it had sued late

last year, accusing the firm of using millions of its newspaper

articles without permission to train its AI chatbot.

Earlier this year, Reuters reported multiple AI companies

were bypassing a web standard used by publishers to block the

scraping of their data used in generative AI systems.

Perplexity faced accusations from media organizations such

as Forbes and Wired for plagiarizing their content, but has

since launched a revenue-sharing program to address some

concerns put forward by publishers.