In June 2024, WIRED and Forbes investigations revealed that Perplexity AI — valued at $3 billion — was summarizing their exclusive articles almost verbatim without attribution or links, while simultaneously ignoring their robots.txt files (which explicitly blocked AI crawlers). News Organisations began sending cease-and-desist letters. The CEO's explanation — that Perplexity didn't directly scrape the blocked pages — was contradicted by WIRED's technical testing. The incident sparked a media industry revolt against AI scrapers.