The BBC is threatening legal action against artificial intelligence search engine Perplexity, in its first effort to clamp down on tech groups scraping its vast troves of content to develop the cutting-edge technology.

In a letter to Perplexity chief Aravind Srinivas seen by the Financial Times, the British national broadcaster says it has evidence that the US start-up’s “default AI model” was “trained using BBC content”.

The letter states it could seek an injunction unless the San Francisco-based company ceases scraping all BBC content, deletes any copies of the broadcaster’s material held for the purposes of developing its AI systems, and provides “a proposal for financial compensation” for the alleged infringement of its intellectual property so far.