Social media giant Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, accusing the startup of scraping vast amounts of user-generated content to train its artificial intelligence models without permission.
The lawsuit also names three other firms: SerpApi, Oxylabs, and AWMProxy. Reddit has previously sued another major AI company, Anthropic, in June for web scraping and data protection violations.
The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses these companies of unfair competition and unjust enrichment while also alleging that some violated US copyright laws.
Reddit said in the complaint that the “data-scraping companies circumvented its data protection measures to steal data that Perplexity desperately needs to power its answer engine system.”
“AI companies are locked in an arms race for quality human content, and that pressure has fueled an industrial-scale ‘data laundering’ economy,” Reddit chief legal officer Ben Lee said in a statement.
Lee added, “scrapers bypass technological protections to steal data and sell it to clients looking for training material.”
He added that "Reddit is a prime target because it's one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created."
“Reddit hosts over 100,000 interest-based subreddit communities,” said in its lawsuit that its “user posts had become the most commonly cited source for AI-generated answers on Perplexity.”
It added that it sent Perplexity a ‘cease-and-desist’ letter, after which it increased the volume of citations to Reddit “forty-fold.”
“Our approach remains principled and responsible as we provide factual answers with accurate AI, and we will not tolerate threats against openness and the public interest,” Perplexity said in a statement.
Perplexity AI responded in a post on the Reddit platform, arguing that it “does not train AI models on content but merely summarizes and cites public Reddit discussions.” Therefore, the company stated that it is “impossible to sign a license agreement”.
Ryan Schafer, customer success director of SerpApi, said they “strongly disagree with Reddit's allegations and intend to defend themselves vigorously.”
Oxylabs said it was "shocked and disappointed" and "will not hesitate to defend itself against these allegations."
Reddit has been at the forefront of fighting against data scraping. In 2023, it asked third parties to start paying for its data. The company has already signed licensing agreements with Google and OpenAI.
AI researchers have earlier noted that a large volume of moderated conversations on Reddit can help AI chatbots to produce more natural-sounding responses.
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“A year ago, after explaining this, Reddit insisted we pay anyway, despite lawfully accessing Reddit data. Bowing to strong-arm tactics just isn’t how we do business,” the statement read, going on to describe the suit as a “show of force in Reddit’s training data negotiations with Google and OpenAI.”
“Perplexity believes this is a sad example of what happens when public data becomes a big part of a public company’s business model,” Perplexity added, noting that data licensing has become an increasingly important source of revenue for Reddit.
In February, Reddit’s COO Jen Wong told the trade publication Adweek that artificial intelligence licensing deals with Google and OpenAI made up nearly 10% of Reddit’s revenue. The lawsuit highlights growing tensions over data ownership, AI transparency, and the ethics of using publicly available content for machine learning.