BBC has filed a copyright lawsuit against AI company Perplexity, claiming that the allegations are fundamentally misunderstood.

On June 20, according to reports, the BBC took action for the first time against technology companies suspected of copyright infringement, threatening to file a lawsuit against the AI search engine startup Perplexity. The BBC stated there is evidence that Perplexity’s “default AI model” used its content for training. The BBC indicated that unless Perplexity stops scraping content and proposes an “economic compensation plan” to remedy the intellectual property infringement, it may seek a court injunction.

Perplexity responded that the BBC’s allegations were “manipulative and opportunistic” and said there was a “fundamental misunderstanding” of its understanding of technology, the internet and intellectual property law. “These allegations also show that the BBC will do whatever it takes to serve its own interests in order to maintain Google’s illegal monopoly position.” Perplexity doesn’t build or train a base model, but rather provides an interface that allows users to choose between other models developed by companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Perplexity’s internal model is built on Meta’s Llama and has been optimized to improve accuracy and reduce misinformation generated by the model, according to people familiar with the matter.