BBC threatens legal action against AI startup over content scraping

Letter sent to Perplexity AI but US-based firm calls corporation’s claims ‘manipulative and opportunistic’

The BBC is threatening legal action against Perplexity AI, in the corporation’s first move to protect its content from being scraped without permission to build artificial intelligence technology.

The corporation has sent a letter to Aravind Srinivas, the chief executive of the San Francisco-based startup, saying it has gathered evidence that Perplexity’s model was “trained using BBC content”.