On June 11, 2024, Forbes published a piece showing that Perplexity AI's new 'Pages' feature had copy-pasted Forbes' exclusive reporting about Eric Schmidt's secretive drone-AI startup Project Gryphon — including its unique research findings and graphics — into a Perplexity-generated article with 'sources' buried in tiny superscripts. Perplexity also generated an AI podcast narrating the reporting as if original. Wired followed days later showing Perplexity was ignoring robots.txt and quoting paywalled articles verbatim. CEO Aravind Srinivas dismissed the outrage as 'some rough edges.' Condé Nast and Forbes sent cease-and-desist letters; News Corp filed an actual lawsuit on October 21, 2024. Perplexity became the lightning rod for the 'AI as laundering machine for copyrighted news' debate.