Perplexity AI in the Spotlight: NYT Lawsuit, Cristiano Ronaldo Investment and New Security Tech – Everything That Happened From 5

Over just three days, Perplexity AI – the fast‑growing “answer engine” positioned as a challenger to Google – has been hit by a major copyright lawsuit from The New York Times, celebrated a headline‑grabbing investment from Cristiano Ronaldo, rolled out a new browser security system, and expanded its reach in India through free premium bundles.

Here’s a detailed look at all the key news, analyses and forecasts involving Perplexity AI from 5–7 December 2025, and what it all means for the company’s future.

1. The New York Times vs Perplexity AI: A landmark copyright fight

On 5 December 2025, The New York Times filed a lawsuit in federal court in New York accusing Perplexity AI of “copying, distributing and displaying millions” of Times articles, including paywalled stories, to power its AI products without permission. ^[1]

According to the complaint and subsequent coverage:

The Times alleges Perplexity “unlawfully crawls, scrapes, copies and distributes” its work and sometimes produces answers that are “verbatim or substantially similar copies” of Times content. ^[2]
The lawsuit claims Perplexity ignored robots.txt and other technical controls that are meant to signal which parts of a site may be crawled. ^[3]
The Times says the startup’s AI has also hallucinated content and falsely attributed it to the paper, citing an example where Perplexity appeared to quote Times product‑review brand Wirecutter praising a baby lounger that the site has never reviewed. ^[4]

The suit asks for damages, an injunction, and other remedies to stop what the Times calls unauthorized use of its journalism. ^[5]

Multiple publishers piling on

Perplexity is not facing the Times alone:

On the same day, the Chicago Tribune filed a parallel copyright complaint against Perplexity. ^[6]
The startup is already fighting lawsuits from Dow Jones and the New York Post, as well as Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam‑Webster, all alleging copyright violations tied to news or reference content. ^[7]
Separate litigation from Reddit accuses Perplexity and others of unlawfully scraping Reddit data to train its systems. ^[8]

Coverage in AI Business frames the Times case as part of a broader wave of content‑owner pushback that began with earlier suits against OpenAI, Stability AI and others – and notes that the Times had already sent Perplexity cease‑and‑desist letters and negotiated for roughly 18 months before suing. ^[9]

Legal analysts quoted there argue the outcome could hinge on:

How Perplexity’s models were trained
Whether its answers are deemed transformative
And whether they displace the market for the Times’ original content. ^[10]

Perplexity’s response

Perplexity has not commented in detail on the specific allegations, but in statements to reporters it has:

Emphasized that it indexes web pages and provides factual citations, rather than scraping data to build foundation models. ^[11]
Framed the lawsuits as part of a long tradition of publishers suing emerging technologies – from radio to social media – with a spokesperson quipping that if lawsuits had worked, “we’d all be talking about this by telegraph.” ^[12]

Why this case matters for Perplexity

This week’s filings escalate Perplexity from a fast‑growing startup with some controversy into a central test case for how far AI “answer engines” can go in reusing journalism without a license.

Key risks and implications:

Injunction risk: If a court grants the Times’ request to block certain forms of crawling or output, it could directly constrain Perplexity’s core product.
Licensing vs litigation: Other publishers, like the Los Angeles Times and The Independent, have chosen licensing deals with Perplexity instead of lawsuits, highlighting a split in strategies across the media industry. ^[13]
Precedent for AI search: A judgment against Perplexity could influence how regulators, courts and other AI search companies interpret “fair use” versus infringement when LLMs summarize or quote copyrighted work.

2. Cristiano Ronaldo invests in Perplexity AI and launches the CR7 hub

The legal drama landed just as Perplexity announced arguably its biggest branding coup to date.

On 4 December, Perplexity revealed a global partnership and investment from football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo, describing him as a dedicated user who relies on the tool in “high‑stakes moments” like award speeches and major announcements. ^[14]

On 5 December, more details emerged from business and marketing outlets:

The Business Times reported that Ronaldo has taken an equity stake in Perplexity in what it called his “most high‑profile investment to date”, though the size of the stake wasn’t disclosed. ^[15]
Perplexity and Ronaldo have signed a multi‑year global sponsorship agreement, positioning the company as a key AI partner in his brand ecosystem. ^[16]
The partnership includes a new interactive CR7 hub inside Perplexity where fans can explore rare photos from Ronaldo’s personal archive, browse curated questions about every era of his career, and replay iconic goals on an interactive pitch. ^[17]

Perplexity’s own blog stresses that this is “more than a sponsorship”: Ronaldo is now both a user and an investor, and the company casts the deal as a sign that “trusted AI is becoming part of how top performers think, prepare, and win.” ^[18]

Marketing coverage in Asia points out that Ronaldo’s fan base gives Perplexity a direct distribution channel to one of the largest and most passionate sports communities on the planet – and that more content, merchandise and in‑app features tied to Ronaldo are planned over the coming years. ^[19]

Why the Ronaldo deal matters

From a strategic standpoint, the partnership does several things at once:

Brand mainstreaming: It moves Perplexity firmly into pop‑culture territory, putting its logo and app in front of millions who might never read an AI blog post.
Signal to investors: Having an athlete‑investor with a reported net worth around $1.4 billion attach both capital and personal brand to Perplexity reinforces its status as a “tier‑one” consumer AI player. ^[20]
Template for celebrity + AI deals: Analyst commentary suggests this could be an inflection point for celebrity‑driven AI branding, where top athletes move from endorsement fees to equity plus AI‑powered fan platforms.

3. BrowseSafe: Perplexity tackles security holes in AI browser agents

On 7 December, Perplexity turned from lawsuits and sponsorships to security, debuting BrowseSafe, a new system designed to protect AI browser agents – including its Comet browser assistant – from prompt‑injection attacks embedded in websites. ^[21]

Reporting on the launch highlights several points:

Perplexity says BrowseSafe achieves a 91% detection rate on prompt‑injection attacks, outperforming smaller security models like PromptGuard‑2 (~35%) and even some large “frontier” models that reach around 85% but are slower. ^[22]
The system is built around a mixture‑of‑experts model (based on Qwen3‑30B) optimized to scan pages fast enough for real‑time use. ^[23]
BrowseSafe is evaluated on a new benchmark, BrowseSafe Bench, which includes:
- Different attack types (instruction overwrites, social engineering, system‑prompt exfiltration)
- Injection strategies (hidden in HTML comments, user‑generated content or page footers)
- And varied linguistic styles (from obvious to subtly disguised, including multilingual attacks). ^[24]

The system sits in a three‑tier defense:

All web content is treated as untrusted.
A lightweight classifier screens pages in real time.
Ambiguous cases are escalated to a reasoning‑heavy frontier model, with difficult examples fed back into training. ^[25]

Perplexity is also open‑sourcing the benchmark, model and research paper to encourage broader work on securing “agentic” AI that can act on users’ behalf. ^[26]

However, even Perplexity’s own evaluation concedes that around 10% of attacks still get through, and analysts note that real‑world web chaos and evolving attack strategies may make comprehensive protection difficult. ^[27]

The backstory: the Comet security scare

BrowseSafe is partly a response to the security scare earlier this year, when browser maker Brave disclosed that Perplexity’s Comet browser assistant could be tricked by indirect prompt injection into leaking sensitive data such as email addresses and one‑time passwords. ^[28]

By building and open‑sourcing BrowseSafe, Perplexity is signalling that it wants to be seen not only as an AI search challenger, but as one of the companies defining security standards for AI agents that have access to logged‑in user sessions.

4. India: Free Perplexity Pro subscriptions and a data‑rich growth strategy

While the Times lawsuit focuses on how Perplexity uses publisher data, a major Indian tech feature published on 7 December shows how aggressively the company is seeking user data and market share in India. ^[29]

Key takeaways from that analysis:

An Airtel customer noticed that their mobile recharge plan suddenly included a Perplexity Pro subscription worth roughly ₹17,000, offered free until July 2026. ^[30]
The piece explains that Perplexity is not alone: Google and OpenAI are also offering long‑term free AI subscriptions via Indian telcos, effectively seeding premium AI tools across tens of millions of users. ^[31]
The author argues this generosity is less philanthropy and more “calculated motive”: India’s enormous and diverse user base is ideal for gathering behavioural data and building training datasets, especially across multiple languages and use cases. ^[32]

The same article underlines that:

Perplexity has reached a $20 billion valuation just three years after its founding. ^[33]
The company has licensing deals giving it access to content from AdWeek, Fortune, Stern, The Independent and the Los Angeles Times, reflecting a hybrid strategy of both scraping public web data and licensing proprietary material. ^[34]

Meanwhile, a separate year‑end feature from The Times of India listed Perplexity alongside Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek among the top AI tools Indians Googled in 2025, describing it as redefining search by providing real‑time, reliable answers with citations. ^[35]

India as Perplexity’s strategic laboratory

India now looks like a test market for Perplexity’s consumer strategy:

Distribution: Bundling expensive Pro plans with mobile data gives Perplexity a fast path to scale in a price‑sensitive market.
Training data: Millions of users asking questions in multiple Indian languages represent a goldmine for improving Perplexity’s models – and raise data‑protection questions the article flags, especially as India’s AI‑specific regulation is still evolving. ^[36]
Competitive pressure: If users grow accustomed to an “answer engine” instead of a traditional search results page, it could shift how Indian consumers perceive Google’s dominance in search over time.

5. How Perplexity’s capabilities stack up: NotebookLM comparison and crypto forecasts

Beyond lawsuits and partnerships, this weekend also saw fresh assessments of how well Perplexity actually performs.

NotebookLM vs Perplexity for deep research

On 7 December, Tom’s Guide published a head‑to‑head test of Google’s NotebookLM vs Perplexity using five challenging research prompts – from houseplant care to reducing household energy use. ^[37]

Highlights from the review:

NotebookLM often delivered more elaborate, multimedia‑rich reports (slideshows, videos, podcasts), but could feel overwhelming or “too much” for quick fact‑finding. ^[38]
Perplexity’s Deep Research feature was praised for concise, digestible answers backed by source links, even when its layouts were less flashy. ^[39]
For some prompts, the reviewer preferred NotebookLM’s depth and presentation – but when all five tests were tallied, the “overall winner” was Perplexity, thanks to its focus on detail, fewer distractions and more consistently helpful answers. ^[40]

For Perplexity, the article is significant not just as a positive review, but because it frames the tool as a serious, mainstream research assistant competing with Google’s own AI knowledge products.

Crypto media using Perplexity as a forecasting engine

Although it falls slightly outside your 5–7 December window (published 1 December), one widely shared crypto feature this week shows how Perplexity’s outputs are being used as content in their own right.

CryptoNews used Perplexity to generate scenario‑based price forecasts for XRP, Pi Network and Bitcoin through the end of 2025, including: ^[41]

XRP staying near current levels or rising toward $8 in bullish conditions
Pi Network potentially rallying 120% or sliding further, depending on sentiment
Bitcoin swinging between $75,000 on the downside and $230,000 in a bullish scenario by 2026

The article repeatedly describes these as Perplexity AI’s projections, and uses them to structure its market analysis.

While crypto forecast pieces are highly speculative and come with heavy disclaimers, the trend is notable: Perplexity is no longer just summarizing others’ research – its own generated scenarios are becoming grist for media coverage, especially in high‑volatility markets like crypto.

6. Funding, valuation and the bigger picture

All of this is happening against the backdrop of Perplexity’s aggressive growth and fundraising:

In September 2025, TechCrunch reported that Perplexity raised about $200 million at a $20 billion valuation, bringing total funding to around $1.5 billion and putting its annual recurring revenue near $200 million. ^[42]
The company has publicly positioned itself as a direct challenger to Google Search, even making a tongue‑in‑cheek offer to buy the Chrome browser earlier this year following antitrust pressure on Google. ^[43]

Combined with Ronaldo’s investment, the Indian telecom bundles, and high‑profile partnerships with athletes like Lewis Hamilton in earlier campaigns, Perplexity is clearly trying to:

Expand its consumer footprint beyond tech‑savvy early adopters
Lock in distribution via browsers, apps and telcos
Own the “answer engine” category before Google, OpenAI, Meta and others can fully absorb the idea into their own products

But that same expansion has put the startup at the center of disputes over:

Copyright and licensing (NYT, Chicago Tribune, Dow Jones, Britannica, Merriam‑Webster) ^[44]
Web crawling practices (Cloudflare previously accused Perplexity’s bots of “stealth crawling” blocked sites; Perplexity denies wrongdoing). ^[45]
Security of AI agents (the Comet prompt‑injection vulnerability and subsequent BrowseSafe rollout). ^[46]

7. Outlook: Three scenarios for Perplexity after a turbulent 72 hours

Taken together, events from 5–7 December 2025 look like a pivot point for Perplexity. Here are three plausible medium‑term scenarios based on the latest reporting and analysis:

Scenario 1: Litigation forces a licensing‑heavy business model

If courts side with the Times and other publishers on key copyright questions, Perplexity may be pushed toward:

Signing more direct licensing deals with news organizations (as it already has with outlets like AdWeek, Fortune and the LA Times). ^[47]
Restricting or modifying how its crawlers interact with robots.txt and paywalls. ^[48]
Adjusting its answer layouts to send more traffic back to publisher sites instead of fully substitutive summaries.

This would raise costs but could also legitimize Perplexity as a licensed, premium news and research layer on top of the web.

Scenario 2: Brand and distribution wins outweigh legal headwinds

If Perplexity successfully defends itself or reaches settlements that avoid crippling injunctions, the company could emerge even stronger:

Ronaldo’s investment and hub make Perplexity hyper‑visible to a global mainstream audience. ^[49]
Free Pro plans via telcos in India push millions of new users into its ecosystem, providing data and lock‑in. ^[50]
Positive comparative reviews like the NotebookLM face‑off reinforce its reputation as a serious research tool, especially among students and knowledge workers. ^[51]

In this scenario, Perplexity transitions from “promising startup” to default companion for answering questions, summarizing documents and exploring the web – particularly in emerging markets.

Scenario 3: Security and governance become the real differentiators

Regardless of lawsuit outcomes, the long‑term battlefield for “answer engines” may be trust and safety:

BrowseSafe shows Perplexity is willing to invest in specialized security infrastructure for AI agents, and to open‑source its benchmarks and models. ^[52]
Ongoing scrutiny around data provenance, hallucinations and copyright may push Perplexity to double down on transparent citations, safety checks and publisher revenue‑sharing programs. ^[53]

If Perplexity can convincingly answer the question, “Can I trust this answer, and where did it come from?”, it could turn today’s controversies into a competitive moat.

8. Timeline: What happened on 5–7 December 2025

To recap the key Perplexity‑related events in this 72‑hour window:

5 December 2025
- The New York Times files a major copyright lawsuit against Perplexity in New York, joined by a parallel complaint from the Chicago Tribune. ^[54]
- AI Business publishes an analysis framing the case in the broader context of AI‑publisher conflicts and Meta’s parallel strategy of striking media licensing deals. ^[55]
- Business and marketing outlets report that Cristiano Ronaldo has invested in Perplexity and signed a global sponsorship deal, alongside the launch of an interactive CR7 fan hub. ^[56]
6 December 2025
- Reuters and other outlets amplify the NYT lawsuit, stressing Perplexity’s $20 billion valuation and the growing list of publisher plaintiffs. ^[57]
7 December 2025
- The Decoder reveals Perplexity’s BrowseSafe security system and benchmark for defending AI browser agents against prompt injection. ^[58]
- The Indian Express publishes a deep dive on why AI companies – including Perplexity – are giving away premium subscriptions in India, calling out Airtel’s free Perplexity Pro bundle and the strategic value of Indian user data. ^[59]
- Tom’s Guide crowns Perplexity the overall winner in a NotebookLM vs Perplexity showdown focused on deep research tasks. ^[60]

From courtroom filings to football megastars and browser security benchmarks, the last three days have turned Perplexity into one of the most closely watched AI companies in the world.

How it navigates this moment – striking the right balance between aggressive growth, respectful licensing, and trustworthy technology – will determine whether it remains a challenger or becomes a central pillar of the next generation of search.

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