ISTANBUL

The BBC is preparing to take legal action against artificial intelligence search engine Perplexity AI, marking the organization's first attempt to safeguard content from unauthorized use to develop artificial intelligence tools.

The broadcaster has issued a letter to Aravind Srinivas, CEO of the San Francisco-based startup, stating it has collected evidence that Perplexity’s model was “trained using BBC content,” Financial Times reported on Friday.

The letter warns that legal action, including a court-ordered injunction, may be pursued if the San Francisco-based firm does not immediately cease using BBC content, delete any content already used to train its AI systems, and present a proposal outlining financial compensation for the alleged violation of the broadcaster’s intellectual property rights.

This marks the BBC’s first formal legal move against an AI firm over content use, signaling rising concern within the organization about the unlicensed use of its publicly available material.

Perplexity dismissed the BBC’s claims as “manipulative and opportunistic,” asserting that the broadcaster demonstrates “a fundamental misunderstanding of technology, the internet and intellectual property law.” The company further claimed that the allegations reveal “how far the BBC is willing to go to preserve Google‘s illegal monopoly for its own self-interest.”

Perplexity offers access to models built by other firms and refines its own to improve accuracy, based on Meta’s Llama.

Supported by Jeff Bezos, the AI start-up is finalizing a funding round that will boost its valuation to $14 billion, up $5 billion in just six months.

The BBC said Perplexity reproduced its content verbatim and included links to recent material, adding that “Perplexity’s tool directly competes with the BBC’s own services.” Executives fear this misuse could damage the BBC’s reputation for neutral journalism.

According to BBC's December research, 17% of Perplexity’s search responses “had significant issues with how they represented the BBC content,” including “factual inaccuracies, sourcing and missing context.”

The letter stated that the search responses were “highly damaging to the BBC, injuring the BBC’s reputation with audiences — including UK license fee-payers who fund the BBC — and undermining their trust in the BBC.”