The boss of controversial startup Perplexity AI made a bizarre offer to help The New York Times while its tech workers our out in strike — just weeks after the Gray Lady threatened to sue the company for “unlawful use” of its articles.
Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of the Jeff Bezos-backed startup, raised eyebrows with his response Monday to a post on X from Times publisher AG Sulzberger that assured staffers that the work stoppage would not impact the publication’s Election Day coverage.
“Hey AG Sulzberger @nytimes – sorry to see this,” Srinivas wrote on X.
“Perplexity is on standby to help ensure your essential coverage is available to all through the election. DM me anytime here.”
Srinivas had to quickly clarify his comment after facing backlash that his offer was tantamount to crossing the picket line of the 600-strong Tech Guild, which went on strike the day before the election.
“To be clear, the offer was not to ‘replace’ journalists or engineers with AI but to provide technical infra support on a high-traffic day,” Srinivas wrote.
A Perplexity spokesperson referred The Post to Srinivas’ comments on X.
The Times and Times Tech Guild were not immediately available for comment.
“It’s pretty gross to suggest this but these AI guys really don’t fundamentally understand the damage they’re doing to key institutions so it’s quite on brand,” New York-based reporter Andy Hirschfeld wrote on X.
Another user accused Srinivas of “disgusting bootlicking behavior.”
Last month, lawyers for the Times fired off a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity AI demanding that it stop using its content.
“Perplexity and its business partners have been unjustly enriched by using, without authorization, The Times’s expressive, carefully written and researched, and edited journalism without a license,” the Times wrote in its letter to the tech firm that looks to challenge Google’s search engine dominance.
The letter, which alleged that Perplexity circumvented its anti-scraping and anti-bot protections against use of its content, gave the company an Oct. 30 deadline to respond.
A week after the Times threatened legal action, The Post and Dow Jones filed suit against Perplexity alleging copyright infringement.
“Perplexity is a generative artificial intelligence company that claims to provide its users accurate and up-to-date news and information in a platform that, in Perplexity’s own words, allows users to ‘Skip the Links’ to original publishers’ websites,” the companies said in the federal lawsuit.
“Perplexity attempts to accomplish this by engaging in a massive amount of illegal copying of publishers’ copyrighted works and diverting customers and critical revenues away from those copyright holders.”
The Post and Dow Jones, both of which are subsidiaries of News Corp, said in their filing that they “seek redress for Perplexity’s brazen scheme to compete for readers while simultaneously freeriding on the valuable content the publishers produce.”
Tech Guild members, meanwhile, resumed picketing outside Times offices in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday morning.
“We know this is a hard day to be on strike for our members but we want to be clear: We are here because of the decisions of @NYTimes management,” the union wrote in an X post on Tuesday.
A Times spokesperson told The Post on Monday: “We look forward to continuing to work with the Tech Guild to reach a fair contract that takes into account that they are already among the highest paid individual contributors in the Company and journalism is our top priority.”