CNN Just Sued Perplexity. Every Business Leader Should Be Paying Attention
Artificial intelligence companies are quietly consuming your company’s most valuable asset. Here’s what some leaders are doing about it.
EXPERT OPINION BY SOREN KAPLAN, WSJ BESTSELLING AUTHOR, KEYNOTE SPEAKER, AND LEADERSHIP STRATEGY ADVISOR
Inc. June 1, 2026
CNN filed a lawsuit late last week against Perplexity AI, accusing the company of scraping more than 17,000 CNN stories, videos, and images to train its AI products and deliver competing content to users—without paying for any of it.
Perplexity’s response: “You can’t copyright facts.” OK, that’s technically true. But there’s a deeper business story at play here.
The CNN lawsuit is the latest in a wave of legal actions by major publishers: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, and Reddit. They’re all trying to address the same question that every business leader should be asking: when AI can consume your organization’s knowledge and content, and what can it do with it?
AI companies are building billion-dollar businesses by training on content other people created. That’s the current business model.
And those same AI companies will likely impact every industry in one way or another. The leaders who understand what they actually own, how to manage it, and how to monetize it will be best suited to survive, and thrive, during the transition. As a leader, do you know what knowledge your company has that’s being extracted freely? Or whether you’ve built the kind of proprietary advantage that can’t be scraped?
Your Knowledge Is an Asset
Most companies have never thought seriously about the value of their knowledge. There’s a difference between information that’s publicly available and insights that are genuinely proprietary. That difference is becoming one of the most important strategic distinctions in business.
Perplexity built its search product partly by pulling from thousands of news sources and delivering the answers directly to users, without sending traffic back to the original publishers. That’s the crux of CNN’s complaint. Their content was used to create a competing product that replaces the original source entirely.
The same dynamic may be playing out inside your own company right now. When employees feed proprietary processes, client strategies, and internal research into public AI tools, that knowledge doesn’t necessarily stay contained. When competitors use AI to synthesize everything your company has ever published, described, or demonstrated publicly, your competitive edge quietly erodes.
The companies that are ahead of this are treating their proprietary knowledge the way they treat their balance sheet: as a measurable asset that needs to be managed, protected, and deliberately monetized.
The Licensing Model as a Competitive Strategy
Some of the smartest media companies are cutting deals with the AI giants. The Associated Press signed a licensing agreement with Google. Axios struck a multiyear deal with OpenAI that funds four new local newsrooms and integrates AP journalism directly into ChatGPT answers with attribution and links back to the source. News Corp signed a licensing deal reportedly worth more than $250 million over five years.
These old-school media players figured out how to go back to school. They recognized that if the AI companies are going to train on your content, you have two choices. You can try to stop it in court, or you can get paid for it and shape how it’s used. We’ve seen this play out the other way before and it didn’t fare well for the incumbents. Just think Napster, the major record labels, and Apple Music.
This isn’t only a media industry disruption. Any company with proprietary data, specialized processes, unique customer insights, or deep domain expertise faces the same structural question. If that knowledge can be extracted, replicated, or trained on without your consent or compensation, your moat is shallower than you think.
Three Questions Every Leader Should Be Asking Right Now
The CNN lawsuit is a useful forcing function. It surfaces a set of questions that most organizations haven’t yet fully addressed:
What knowledge assets do we own? Map your organization’s knowledge the way you’d map any other strategic asset. What processes, data, research, or expertise give you a real competitive edge?
How is your knowledge being used without permission? Assume that your publicly available content, including your website, published case studies, white papers, and employee-generated content on platforms like LinkedIn, is already being used to train AI models. Are you leaking competitive advantage or leaving knowledge monetization on the table?
What’s the business opportunity? If your organization produces proprietary data, research, or specialized content, there may be real revenue in structuring formal agreements with AI platforms that want to access it. Even if you’re not a content creator, consider how you might provide data in the form of APIs that power others’ AI applications.
The Strategic Lesson Behind the Headline
Perplexity’s argument that you can’t copyright facts is both legally accurate and strategically hollow. Facts aren’t what companies like CNN are actually selling. They’re selling the judgment, sourcing, context, and trust that turn raw facts into something worth reading. That’s the asset.
Every company has an equivalent to CNN’s capabilities. It’s your judgment, how you do what you do, the relationships that make you successful, and the processes that turn all this into something valuable for the market.
This Week
Take 30 minutes and map the assets your organization owns explicitly as hard data or implicitly as informal knowledge and processes.
Ask: What does our company know, create, or generate that would be difficult for a competitor to replicate by training AI on public information? Then ask whether you have policies in place governing how that knowledge is used internally with AI tools—and what it could mean to license it externally to other companies.
Remember this: If you can be scraped, you can be replicated. So, either prevent it or turn it into your next business model.