Reddit Sues Perplexity For Alleged Data Scraping To Train AI Models

(RTTNews) - Reddit (RDDT) has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against AI search engine Perplexity, accusing it of illegally scraping data from its platform to train its AI models.

The complaint, filed in New York federal court, also targets three smaller entities, Lithuanian firm Oxylabs, Texas-based SerpApi, and Russian-linked AWMProxy, alleging they aided in large-scale data extraction by disguising their identities and operations.

Reddit's chief legal officer Ben Lee said AI companies were "locked in an arms race for quality human content," driving what he called an "industrial-scale data laundering economy." The filing claimed Perplexity "desperately" needed Reddit's data to power its "answer engine" and had accessed it through Google search results.

Perplexity responded that it had not received the lawsuit but defended its mission to ensure users "freely and fairly access public knowledge," calling its practices "principled and responsible." Oxylabs and SerpApi similarly denied wrongdoing, stating they had not been served and would defend themselves in court.

Sources told the Financial Times that Reddit had previously confronted Perplexity about unauthorized data use and proposed a paid partnership, but CEO Aravind Srinivas declined. Reddit also alerted Google, urging it to investigate whether Perplexity was scraping through its search engine. Google declined to comment.

The lawsuit adds to a growing list of copyright disputes targeting AI firms accused of using online data without permission. Reddit, which went public in March 2024, has legitimate data-licensing agreements with Google and OpenAI but claims the defendants bypassed its protections. The company had previously sued Anthropic in June over similar allegations.

Wednesday, RDDT closed at $197.05 or 4.21% lower and currently trades after hours at $196.50 or 0.28% lower on the NYSE.