Nikkei Inc. and The Asahi Shimbun Company jointly filed a lawsuit against U.S. artificial-intelligence startup Perplexity AI in the Tokyo District Court on 26 August, alleging the company copied and stored their newspaper articles without permission. The publishers say the AI search engine bypassed technical safeguards on their servers, reproduced full-text stories and distributed summaries to users in breach of Japan’s Copyright Act. The two newspapers are seeking an injunction to stop further use of their content, the deletion of existing copies and a total of ¥4.4 billion (roughly $30 million) in damages—¥2.2 billion for each publisher. They also argue that some of Perplexity’s output contained factual errors while citing their mastheads, behaviour they claim violates Japan’s Unfair Competition Prevention Act in addition to copyright rules. The action follows a similar complaint lodged by Yomiuri Shimbun earlier this month and underscores rising legal pressure on generative-AI operators in Japan. Media groups worldwide are increasingly turning to courts to protect proprietary journalism from being scraped for machine-learning models, a trend that is intensifying calls for clearer regulation of AI-related content use.