Reddit Files Lawsuit Alleging Perplexity AI Firm Illegally Scraped Millions of Comments

Reddit has filed a lawsuit against AI startup Perplexity and three data-scraping companies—Oxylabs, AWMProxy, and SerpApi—accusing them of illegally scraping Reddit's content to train Perplexity's AI-powered answer engine. Despite a cease-and-desist letter issued in May 2024, which demanded Perplexity stop scraping Reddit data unless a licensing agreement was made, Perplexity's citations to Reddit content increased substantially, suggesting continued unauthorized use. Reddit alleges these companies circumvented its anti-scraping measures and Google’s controls by extracting Reddit content from Google search results, a practice Reddit terms as "data laundering." The lawsuit highlights that Reddit's vast repository of human-generated content is highly valuable for training AI models, and Reddit seeks both monetary damages and an injunction to halt further scraping. Perplexity denies wrongdoing, asserting its commitment to open access to public knowledge and disputing Reddit’s claims, pledging to defend itself vigorously in court. This legal action follows a pattern of similar lawsuits by Reddit and other publishers against AI companies for unauthorized use of copyrighted materials.