Reddit sues Perplexity AI for ‘data theft’, accuses startup of illegally scraping platform content
Lawsuit claims Perplexity and data-scraping firms bypassed protections to fuel AI engine.
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Social media giant Reddit has filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI in a New York federal court, accusing it of unlawfully scraping Reddit’s data to train its AI-based search and “answer engine.” The complaint also names three other companies - Oxylabs (Lithuania), AWMProxy (Russia), and SerpApi (Texas) - as co-defendants.
Reddit, as per media reports, alleged that these companies circumvented its data protection measures to extract vast amounts of user-generated content that Perplexity “desperately needs” to power its platform. The company described the alleged activity as part of an “industrial-scale data laundering economy” driven by AI firms’ hunger for quality human content.
“AI companies are locked in an arms race for quality human content and that pressure has fueled an industrial-scale ‘data laundering’ economy,” said Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, in a statement, as per Reuters.
The lawsuit marks the latest in a growing wave of legal battles between content owners and AI developers over the unauthorized use of copyrighted or proprietary material to train artificial intelligence systems. Reddit had filed a similar lawsuit against Anthropic earlier this year, which remains ongoing.
Perplexity, in a statement, reportedly rejected the allegations, saying its approach “remains principled and responsible as we provide factual answers with accurate AI,” adding that it “will not tolerate threats against openness and the public interest.”
Reddit’s complaint reportedly states that its content, generated across thousands of subreddit communities, is among the most frequently cited sources in AI-generated responses. The company said it has formally licensed data access to platforms such as Google and OpenAI, but that Perplexity does not have such a license.
According to Reddit, Perplexity worked with at least one of the accused data-scraping firms to harvest content from billions of search results without authorization. The company reportedly said it even sent a cease-and-desist notice to Perplexity last year, after which the AI firm “increased the volume of citations to Reddit forty-fold.”
Reddit is seeking unspecified monetary damages and a court order barring Perplexity from using its data.
