Social media giant Reddit is suing Perplexity AI and three other firms over alleged “industrial-scale” scraping of posts from its website.
Perplexity – a San Francisco-based startup with its own chatbot and “answer engine” – has allegedly skirted Reddit’s data protections to swipe posts from the site for its own use, according to the lawsuit filed Wednesday in New York federal court.
In contrast, companies including Google and OpenAI have signed deals with Reddit, other social media firms and news outlets, which provide content used to train AI chatbots.
Reddit is seeking unspecified damages in the new suit, accusing the defendants of unfair competition and enrichment, as well as breaking US copyright laws.
The company filed a similar complaint against Anthropic in June.
This time around, instead of just suing Perplexity, Reddit is taking aim at the smaller partners it relies on to scrape data behind the scenes.
Along with Perplexity, the new suit names Oxylabs UAB, AWMProxy and SerpApi – which Reddit described as “a Lithuanian data scraper, a former Russian botnet, and a Texas company that publicly advertises its shady circumvention tactics,” respectively.
These data scrapers “mask their identities, hide their locations, and disguise their web scrapers to steal Reddit content from Google Search,” Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, told The Post in a statement.
“Perplexity is a willing customer of at least one of these scrapers, choosing to buy stolen data rather than enter into a lawful agreement with Reddit itself.”
Perplexity has denied the allegations and accused Reddit of “extortion.” It did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
A spokesperson for SerpApi also denied the claims in the suit, adding that the company “stands firmly behind its business model and conduct.”
Denas Grybauskas, chief governance and strategy officer at Oxylabs, told The Post in a statement that Oxylabs “will not hesitate to defend itself against these allegations.”
“Oxylabs has always been and will continue to be a pioneer and industry leader in public data collection.”
AWMProxy could not immediately be reached for comment.
Reddit boasts more than 100,000 “subreddit” communities on its site, where users debate and discuss everything from sports and politics to video games and TV shows.
Researchers have said Reddit’s trove of user responses can help train AI chatbots to generate more human-like responses.
In the suit, Reddit said posts from users on its website had become the most frequently cited source for AI-generated answers across Perplexity.
Reddit said it sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter – but afterwards, the AI platform’s use of its content tripled “forty-fold,” according to the lawsuit.
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