Folha de S.Paulo, one of Brazil's largest daily newspapers, has filed a lawsuit in a São Paulo state court against Perplexity AI, demanding that the US tech company immediately stop collecting and using the newspaper's content without authorization or payment to feed its artificial intelligence platform. The case was first reported by Folha itself on Monday (24); as of Monday evening, no other outlet had independently reported the lawsuit.
According to the newspaper, the suit seeks damages for the improper use of its reporting to train AI models and for delivering summaries and copies of journalistic articles to users, including stories reserved for paying subscribers. Folha also asks that Perplexity destroy any AI models built with its protected material and requests a daily fine should the company fail to comply with a court order blocking access to its content. The judge overseeing the case gave the company 72 hours to respond.
The newspaper's lawyer, Taís Gasparian, said the case rests on three grounds:
"The action is founded on three points: unfair competition, paywall violation and copyright infringement. The enormous effort that good journalism makes to stay afloat is trampled by the unauthorized appropriation of its content, through the sidestepping of rules."
According to the report, the technical barriers Folha uses to prevent this kind of collection are ignored or bypassed by the AI chatbot's mechanisms, and the newspaper recorded hundreds of thousands of improper accesses. The suit also says Folha tried to negotiate a friendly licensing deal with Perplexity, along the lines of the content partnerships it signed with OpenAI and Google, but says it was ignored by the defendant.
Deals with OpenAI and Google, and disputes abroad
Folha had sued OpenAI in 2025, but in May this year the newspaper and its sister portal UOL announced a first-of-its-kind agreement in Brazil with the startup behind ChatGPT. Also in 2025, Folha signed a similar partnership with Google to improve Gemini, the company's AI model.
Perplexity, whose AI answer engine summarizes and cites web content, faces lawsuits from media groups in several countries over the unauthorized use of journalistic material. Folha's report cites the case of The New York Times, which has also sued the company.