Add another line to the laundry list of drama facing Perplexity: The AI startup was hit with a lawsuit yesterday by News Corp-owned Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post alleging copyright infringement, a day after the company’s plans for more funding became public.

News Corp alleges that Perplexity, an AI chatbot and search engine, violated copyright laws by…copying writing from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post and using it to respond to users’ queries, “freeriding” off the news companies and simultaneously driving away their internet traffic.

According to the suit:

• News Corp publishers sent a letter to Perplexity in July, warning it of legal action if it continued to use copyrighted works and even proposed a licensing deal, but Perplexity ghosted them.
• The complaint alleges that Perplexity can reproduce full articles if asked to and also “hallucinates,” or adds incorrect details to content.

Plus: Last week, the New York Times sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity demanding it stop using its content, per the WSJ.

Growth at a cost

Even after angering multiple media companies, Perplexity is as confident as a white man who can jump. It’s in talks for a fourth round of funding this year to raise an additional $500 million—which would increase its value to ~$9 billion, up from $3 billion in June—according to the WSJ, as it tries to capitalize on the same AI-hype momentum that’s fueled OpenAI’s meteoric rise.

But it isn’t OpenAI. News Corp made that clear in the lawsuit, saying it applauds “principled companies like OpenAI,” which in May made a deal worth $250 million to use News Corp’s content to train its model. Still, not everything is rosy for the ChatGPT-maker: The New York Times sued it late last year, making allegations similar to the ones News Corp brought against Perplexity.—CC

McDonald’s clarifies involvement in Trump visit but does not endorse him. The fast-food giant wants to be unburdened by what has been: In a message sent to employees and reviewed by the Associated Press, the company said a franchisee reached out to corporate after he learned that the GOP presidential candidate wanted to visit a Pennsylvania restaurant. McDonald’s agreed to the event in Feasterville (a real place), during which Trump worked the fry station and answered questions through the drive-thru while the store was closed to the public. The message also said, “McDonald’s does not endorse candidates for elected office and that remains true in this race for the next president. We are not red or blue—we are golden.”

The “Central Park Five” sue Trump for “defamatory” comments. Attorneys for the group, also known as the “Exonerated Five,” filed a federal lawsuit against Donald Trump for comments he made during the presidential debate hosted by ABC in September. At the event, Vice President Kamala Harris said that Trump “took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the execution of five young Black and Latino boys who were innocent, the Central Park Five.” In response, Trump said the boys, who were between 14 and 16 years old at the time of the incident in 1989, “admitted—they said, they pled guilty” and that they “killed a person ultimately.” The complaint states that the members neither killed anyone nor pled guilty to the crime.