Nikkei and the Asahi Shimbun have sued artificial-intelligence startup Perplexity AI over alleged copyright infringement, joining other news organizations in Japan and the U.S. that are challenging the use of their content in AI tools.

The newspapers are seeking an injunction and ¥2.2 billion ($15 million) each in damages from Perplexity, they said in a joint statement Tuesday. The suit was filed at the Tokyo District Court.

The legal action by the Nikkei, which owns Japan’s biggest financial newspaper, and the left-leaning Asahi underscores a widening rift between publishers and AI companies over who controls — and profits from — the distribution of news.

The media industry argues that AI tools using their work without licenses siphons away readership and ad revenue, threatening already fragile business models.

"These actions amount to continuous and large-scale freeloading on journalists’ time and effort,” Nikkei and Asahi said in the statement. "If left unchecked, this could undermine all media outlets trying to accurately report the facts and ultimately shake the very foundations of democracy.”

Courts in Japan, the U.S. and Europe are now emerging as key battlegrounds that could set precedents for how copyright law applies to generative AI.

Perplexity, based in San Francisco, has also been targeted by Forbes, News Corp.’s Dow Jones and the Yomiuri Shimbun.

Perplexity, which fetched a $18 billion value at its last fundraising, reproduced and saved content from the Nikkei and the Asahi since at least June last year, the newspapers said. The startup’s AI search results ignored coding that indicated content was off-limits and also inserted errors that were attributed to the news organizations, damaging the papers’ reputations, they said.