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Telegraph
an hour ago
- Business
- Telegraph
BBC threatens to sue US tech start-up for ripping off news stories
The BBC is threatening to sue a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence (AI) company accusing it of ripping off the broadcaster's news stories. The corporation has reportedly written to Perplexity AI, a search engine rival to Google, saying it has seen evidence that the company's AI model was trained using BBC articles. The letter, which was sent to Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity's chief, threatened an injunction against the American company unless it stops scraping BBC stories, deletes all existing copies of the broadcaster's content and submits a 'proposal for financial compensation'. Perplexity has been contacted for comment. The company told the Financial Times, which first reported the letter, that the BBC's claims were 'manipulative and opportunistic', adding that the broadcaster had 'a fundamental misunderstanding of technology, the internet and intellectual property law'. It said: '[The claims] also show how far the BBC is willing to go to preserve Google's monopoly for its own self-interest.' The legal salvo marks are the first time the BBC has entered the escalating debate over AI and copyright. High-profile companies and bosses across the creative industries have accused tech firms of disregarding copyright laws by using their material to train AI models without permission. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, which are owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, have both already sued Perplexity for copyright infringement. Meanwhile, The New York Times has launched legal action against ChatGPT maker OpenAI. Hollywood giant Disney and record labels Universal and Sony are among other major media companies to have launched legal action. AI licencing deals The BBC, which is primarily funded through the licence fee, has reportedly held discussions with tech firms including Amazon about licencing its content to be used for AI. But the legal action suggests growing concerns at the corporation that its articles have already been ripped off. It comes at a critical time for the BBC, which is locked in discussions with ministers over the future of the licence fee funding model. Any AI licencing deals could prove a vital new source of revenue at a time when the broadcaster has been forced to make heavy cuts to balance the books. Perplexity, which was founded in 2022, is an AI-powered search engine that allows users to search the web by asking questions in a conversational style. It runs a default language model and also provides subscribers with access to others including Chat GPT and Claude. The company, which counts Amazon founder Jeff Bezos among its investors, has more than 30m users and is closing in on fresh funding that would give it a valuation of $14bn (£10.4bn). In the letter, the BBC reportedly accused Perplexity of reproducing parts of its news stories verbatim, arguing that the company was diverting readers away from its website. The BBC also raised concerns that AI search engines were inserting factual inaccuracies or removing context from articles, which it warned could damage the broadcaster's reputation for impartial journalism. It said: 'It is therefore highly damaging to the BBC, injuring the BBC's reputation with audiences – including UK licence fee-payers who fund the BBC – and undermining their trust in the BBC.'
BBC News
an hour ago
- Business
- BBC News
BBC threatens AI firm with legal action over unauthorised content use
The BBC is threatening to take legal action against an artificial intelligence (AI) firm whose chatbot the corporation says is reproducing BBC content "verbatim" without its BBC has written to Perplexity, which is based in the US, demanding it immediately stops using BBC content, deletes any it holds, and proposes financial compensation for the material it has already is the first time that the BBC - one of the world's largest news organisations - has taken such action against an AI has been approached for comment. The BBC's legal threat has been made in a letter to Perplexity's boss Aravind Srinivas."This constitutes copyright infringement in the UK and breach of the BBC's terms of use," the letter BBC also cited its research published earlier this year that found four popular AI chatbots - including Perplexity AI - were inaccurately summarising news stories, including some BBC to findings of significant issues with representation of BBC content in some Perplexity AI responses analysed, it said such output fell short of BBC Editorial Guidelines around the provision of impartial and accurate news."It is therefore highly damaging to the BBC, injuring the BBC's reputation with audiences - including UK licence fee payers who fund the BBC - and undermining their trust in the BBC," it added. Web scraping scrutiny Chatbots and image generators that can generate content response to simple text or voice prompts in seconds have swelled in popularity since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late their rapid growth and improving capabilities has prompted questions about their use of existing material without of the material used to develop generative AI models has been pulled from a massive range of web sources using bots and crawlers, which automatically extract site data. The rise in this activity, known as web scraping, recently prompted British media publishers to join calls by creatives for the UK government to uphold protections around copyrighted is AI, and how do chatbots like ChatGPT and DeepSeek work?Many organisations, including the BBC, use a file called " in their website code to try to block bots and automated tools from extracting data en masse for instructs bots and web crawlers to not access certain pages and material, where compliance with the directive remains voluntary and, according to some reports, bots do not always respect BBC said in its letter that while it disallowed two of Perplexity's crawlers, the company "is clearly not respecting Srinivas denied accusations that its crawlers ignored instructions in an interview with Fast Company last also says that because it does not build foundation models, it does not use website content for AI model pre-training. 'Answer engine' The company's AI chatbot has become a popular destination for people looking for answers to common or complex questions, describing itself as an "answer engine".It says on its website that it does this by "searching the web, identifying trusted sources and synthesising information into clear, up-to-date responses".It also advises users to double check responses for accuracy - a common caveat accompanying AI chatbots, which can be known to state false information in a matter of fact, convincing January Apple suspended an AI feature that generated false headlines for BBC News app notifications when summarising groups of them for iPhones users, following BBC complaints. Sign up for our Tech Decoded newsletter to follow the world's top tech stories and trends. Outside the UK? Sign up here.
Fox News
an hour ago
- Politics
- Fox News
Fox News Highlights – June 19th, 2025
Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity and Greg Gutfeld bring Fox News viewers their fresh takes on the top news of the day. #trump #news #politics #foxnews #highlights #fox #primetime #hannity #ingrahamangle #gutfeld #jessewatters #recap #us #media #monologue #world #breakingnews #israeliran #iran #israel #nuclearweapons #middleeast #nuclear #war #politics #violence #strikes #telaviv #airforce #trump #washington #aircraft Learn more about your ad choices. Visit
CTV News
an hour ago
- Business
- CTV News
Price of gas, diesel increases in Maritimes
Atlantic Watch The price of gasoline and diesel increased significantly in all three Maritime provinces.
SBS Australia
an hour ago
- General
- SBS Australia
"The Ezidi community is self-reliant and successful in toowoomba"
Independent news and stories connecting you to life in Australia and Kurdish-speaking Australians. SBS World News Take a global view with Australia's most comprehensive world news service Watch now
