The corporation is said to have warned the American start-up, which counts Jeff Bezos as an investor, it could seek an injunction
The BBC has threatened legal action against Perplexity, according to a report in the FT.
In what the report says is the corporation’s first attempt to stop tech companies scraping its content to develop AI models, the BBC has written to the CEO of Perplexity AI, Aravind Srinivas, stating it has evidence that the US company’s “default AI model” was trained using its content.
The move reflects growing concerns across the creative industries around copyright laws and the protection of content rights. Acknowledging the issue in a speech at the Deloitte and Enders Analysis’ Media & Telecoms 2025 & Beyond Conference earlier this month, Lisa Nandy, the UK’s Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, said, “The issue of AI and copyright needs to be properly considered and enforceable legislation drafted with the inclusion, involvement and experience of both creatives and technologists.”
Perplexity AI, an American start-up which includes Jeff Bezos among its investors, does not build its own models, but provides an interface via which users can choose from others built by providers such as OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. Its in-house model is based on a refined version of Meta’s Llama, designed to reduce so-called hallucinations – model-generated false information, according to the FT.
In an effective cease and desist letter, the BBC reportedly warned the company that it could seek an injunction unless Perplexity deletes all copies of the broadcaster’s material and provides a “proposal for financial compensation” for the alleged breach.
Perplexity, which has more than 30 million users, predominantly in the US, apparently responded robustly, stating the claims were “manipulative and opportunistic” and that it had “a fundamental misunderstanding of technology, the internet and intellectual property law.”
The company is in the process of finalising a funding round that would increase its value to $14 billion, a rise of $5 billion over its valuation at the start of the year.
BBC executives are said to be concerned that AI companies are misusing its content which they claim could inflict reputational harm. Its own research into the accuracy of several AI assistants in December found 17 per cent of Perplexity’s search responses “had significant issues with how they represented the BBC content used as a source . . . the most common problems were factual inaccuracies, sourcing and missing context”.