Fri, 20 Jun 2025

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 BBC threatens AI firm with legal action over unauthorised content use

It is first time that the BBC has taken such action regarding alleged scraping of its content for AI.
The BBC has threatened to take legal action against Perplexity, an AI company based in the US, over its use of BBC content without permission. The corporation claims that Perplexity's chatbot reproduces BBC content "verbatim" and demands that it immediately stops using the material, deletes any existing copies, and provides financial compensation. This is the first time the BBC has taken such action against an AI company. The BBC cites its research from earlier this year, which found that four popular AI chatbots, including Perplexity's, were inaccurately summarizing news stories, including some BBC content. The corporation states that this output falls short of its Editorial Guidelines and damages its reputation with audiences, including UK licence fee payers. Perplexity has responded by stating that the BBC is trying to preserve Google's monopoly on search engines. However, the BBC insists that it is simply upholding its copyright rights and complying with UK law. The issue highlights concerns over the use of AI models, which are often trained using web scraping techniques that involve extracting data from websites without permission. The Professional Publishers Association (PPA) has expressed concern about this practice, stating that it threatens the UK's publishing industry and undermines trust in news sources. Perplexity claims not to build foundation models and therefore does not use website content for AI model pre-training. However, the BBC asserts that the company is still using its content without permission and ignoring robots.txt directives that instruct bots to respect certain pages and material.
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