Reddit has filed a lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company Perplexity AI, accusing it of illegally collecting large amounts of Redditâs content to train and power its AI systems. The complaint (filed on October 22 in a federal court in Manhattan) also names three other companies, which include Oxylabs, SerpApi, and AWMProxy, as co-defendants. Reddit claims these firms extracted millions of posts and comments from the platform and supplied them to Perplexity without permission. According to Reddit, such action violated its terms of service and ignored technical safeguards meant to block automated data harvesting.
In the filing, Reddit argues that Perplexity and its partners engaged in ‘industrial-scale scraping’ for profit, bypassing anti-bot protections and using indirect methods to extract information. The company alleges that the scrapers not only accessed Reddit directly but also exploited Googleâs search results to gather content in a way that evaded detection. Redditâs lawyers claim that the data collection was done deliberately and systematically, targeting valuable discussions across millions of subreddit communities to enhance Perplexityâs AI products (like its ‘answer engine’) without permission or compensation.
Importantly, Reddit stated that it discovered the scraping through its own investigation. To test this, the company created a hidden post that could only be found through Google search, not on Reddit itself. When that post later appeared in Perplexityâs AI results, Reddit took it as proof that Perplexity was using data obtained without permission. As per Reddit, it tried to resolve the issue before going to court. Even the company sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter in May 2024, instructing it to stop using Redditâs content without a license. But after that, Perplexityâs tool reportedly cited Reddit data about forty times more often, which Reddit saw as proof that the company ignored the warning and continued using its content for profit.
In the lawsuit, Reddit is asking for financial damages and a permanent injunction to prevent Perplexity and the data-scraping firms from using its content without permission. The complaint does not specify an amount but states that the defendants caused significant harm. Reddit notes that it has already entered into paid licensing deals with other technology firms (including Google and OpenAI) for the responsible use of its data.
This is not the first time Reddit has filed a lawsuit over unauthorized use of its content. Earlier, in June 2025, the company filed a similar case against Anthropic, another AI startup, for allegedly using its posts and comments without permission to train its AI models. And cases like these are showing a growing pattern of disputes between online platforms and AI companies over the use of publicly available user-generated content. Actually, other major firms like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta are also facing similar lawsuits from authors, publishers, and media groups.
Considering this scenario, it is worth noting that recently Anthropic agreed to pay a historic $1.5 billion to settle a similar case, which is considered one of the largest settlements of its kind. The case involved authors who claimed their books were used without permission to train the companyâs AI systems.
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