Reddit Files Lawsuit Against Perplexity AI and Others
Reddit has initiated legal action against Perplexity AI, along with three other companies, claiming that they have been scraping content from its platform on a large scale.
The lawsuit, lodged in a New York federal court on Wednesday, accuses San Francisco-based Perplexity, which operates its own chatbot and response engine, of bypassing Reddit’s data protections to extract posts for its own benefit.
In contrast, companies like Google and OpenAI have established agreements with Reddit and other platforms to use content for training their AI systems.
Reddit is pursuing unspecified damages in this lawsuit, alleging unfair competition, unjust enrichment, and breaches of U.S. copyright law.
This isn’t the first time Reddit has taken legal action; a similar complaint was filed against Anthropic back in June.
This time, however, Reddit isn’t solely going after Perplexity. It’s also targeting the smaller firms that help gather data behind the scenes.
Alongside Perplexity, the lawsuit names Oxylabs UAB, AWMProxy, and SerpApi. Reddit describes these entities as a “Lithuanian data scraper,” “a former Russian botnet,” and “a Texas company that promotes dubious evasion tactics,” respectively.
According to Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, these data scrapers “steal Reddit content from Google searches while disguising their identities and locations.”
Lee added that Perplexity is a customer of at least one of these scrapers, suggesting the startup opts to buy stolen data instead of negotiating a legitimate contract with Reddit.
Perplexity has denied the accusations, claiming that Reddit is engaging in “blackmail.” The company did not provide a response when contacted.
A spokesperson from SerpApi also refuted the claims made in the lawsuit, asserting that their business model and operations are legitimate.
Denas Grybauskas, Oxylabs’ chief governance and strategy officer, expressed readiness to defend against the allegations, stating that Oxylabs is a leader in public data collection.
Efforts to reach AWMProxy for comments were unsuccessful.
Reddit boasts over 100,000 subreddit communities, where users engage in conversations ranging from sports to politics and entertainment.
Researchers suggest that the wealth of user-generated content on Reddit could be instrumental in training AI chatbots to respond in a more human-like manner.
In its complaint, Reddit noted that user posts have become the most cited source of AI-generated responses on Perplexity’s platform. Furthermore, Reddit claims it sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity but observed a “40x” increase in content usage since then.
