In mid-June, Forbes reported finding its content within Perplexity’s Pages tool with minimal attribution. Pages allows Perplexity users to curate content and share it with others. Ars Technica sister publication Wired later made similar claims, also noting suspicious traffic patterns from IP addresses likely linked to Perplexity that were ignoring robots.txt exclusions. Perplexity was also found to be manipulating its crawling bots’ ID string to get around website blocks.

So hang on, they were caught stealing content, and now they’re trying to sign up the people they stole content from and get them to pay? If that’s not the textbook definition of racketeering and extortion I don’t know what is.