Why BBC has ‘threatened’ AI company led by Desi CEO

The BBC has threatened legal action against US AI search engine Perplexity in an effort to block the company from using its vast content archives to train AI models. The British national broadcaster alleges that Perplexity’s AI model was trained on BBC content without permission. In a letter to Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, seen by the Financial Times, the BBC stated it has evidence that the San Francisco-based startup’s “default AI model” was “trained using BBC content.”

The letter outlines a clear demand: the BBC could seek an injunction unless Perplexity immediately ceases scraping all BBC content, deletes any copies of the broadcaster’s material used for AI development, and provides “a proposal for financial compensation” for the alleged intellectual property infringement.