Perplexity AI plagiarism — verbatim content reproduction without attribution
Date: 2024-06
Affected: Forbes, WIRED, Condé Nast, and other publishers
Attack vector: other
Category: real-world
Severity: High

Forbes, WIRED, and other publishers documented that Perplexity AI's search engine reproduced their copyrighted articles nearly verbatim, including paraphrased passages and specific data points, without proper attribution or licensing. Perplexity's system crawled and cached articles despite robots.txt restrictions, then generated responses that closely mirrored the original content structure and language.

Impact: Copyright infringement allegations; publisher lawsuits; partnership negotiations; trust damage with content creators

Mitigations:
Respect robots.txt and publisher licensing terms in web crawling
Content similarity detection to prevent near-verbatim reproduction
Mandatory source attribution with links to original content
Publisher opt-in/opt-out mechanisms with revenue sharing

Architectural layers (MAESTRO):
label: Data Operations
notes: Web crawler ignored robots.txt restrictions and cached copyrighted content
role: origin
label: Foundation Models
notes: Model reproduced near-verbatim content from cached sources without transformation
role: propagation
label: Security & Compliance
notes: No copyright compliance layer or attribution verification in generation pipeline
role: blind-spot