(Reuters) - Perplexity said on Thursday the allegations of copyright infringement in a lawsuit filed by Dow Jones and the New York Post were misleading, and vowed to defend itself.

The media conglomerate News Corp ( NWSA )-owned publishers sued California-based Perplexity on Monday, claiming that the startup engages in a "massive amount of illegal copying" of their copyrighted work.

The lawsuit says that Perplexity did not respond to a letter sent by the two news publishers in July, notifying it of the legal issues raised by its unauthorized use of copyrighted works, and offering to discuss a potential licensing deal. 

Perplexity denied this in a blog post on Thursday, saying that it responded to the letter the very same day and "instead of continuing the dialogue, they filed this lawsuit."

Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity's CEO, was "surprised" by the lawsuit from media baron Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones and the New York Post against the search startup, he said at the WSJ Tech Live conference on Wednesday.

The lawsuit is the latest salvo in a bitter ongoing battle between publishers and tech companies over unauthorized use of copyrighted content to build and operate their AI systems.

The AI company is among the leading startups attempting to uproot the search engine market dominated by Alphabet's Google. It assembles information from webpages it deems to be authoritative, then provides a summary directly within Perplexity's own tool.