Artificial-intelligence search startup Perplexity has introduced Comet Plus, a $5-a-month subscription that offers curated news content and pays participating publishers a share of the fees. The company has set aside an initial $42.5 million pool and will pass 80% of subscription revenue to media partners while retaining the remainder to cover computing costs. Comet Plus extends Perplexity’s July 2024 advertising-based revenue-sharing initiative by compensating publishers when their articles are surfaced in queries handled by the company’s AI assistant or its Comet browser. Existing Pro and Max subscribers will receive the new tier automatically, broadening the funding base for payouts. Chief Executive Officer Aravind Srinivas said the model is meant to ensure journalists are paid “in the AI age” as search behavior shifts toward direct answers rather than click-throughs. The move also comes as Perplexity faces copyright suits from News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal and other outlets that accuse the startup of profiting from their work without permission. By offering a formal revenue split, Perplexity aims to ease industry tensions and differentiate itself from larger rivals such as Google, whose AI-generated summaries have been blamed for siphoning traffic from news sites. The company says the size of the payout pool will rise with subscriber growth and additional publisher agreements.