Reddit has initiated a major legal challenge against the artificial intelligence company Perplexity and three external firms that it accuses of operating as large-scale data-scraping entities. In its official complaint, Reddit seeks to halt what it calls the systematic and unlawful evasion of its digital safeguards by a collection of actors who, according to the company, have demonstrated relentless determination to obtain and exploit valuable copyrighted material from the Reddit platform. The filing positions this behavior as an orchestrated and industrial-level operation of data extraction, carried out with utter disregard for permission, legality, or intellectual property rights.
Within the lawsuit, Reddit draws a particularly striking metaphor to describe the conduct of the accused data scraping services—identified as SerpApi, Oxylabs, and AWMProxy—likening them to would-be bank robbers who, unable to penetrate the vault directly, instead intercept the armored truck transporting the cash. Through this comparison, Reddit underscores what it perceives as both the deliberate and covert nature of these companies’ tactics. According to Reddit’s allegations, Perplexity is not merely a passive beneficiary of their actions but an active client of at least one of these firms, allegedly employing their services to obtain Reddit data for its own “answer engine” product. The company asserts that Perplexity’s eagerness to acquire Reddit’s data has driven it to exploit illicit methods—doing everything possible to access such information except, notably, entering into a formal and lawful licensing agreement as some of its industry competitors have done.
The complaint details a sequence of events that escalated tensions between the two companies. In May 2024, Reddit sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter formally demanding that it cease any unauthorized scraping of Reddit’s platform. At that time, Perplexity reportedly assured Reddit that it was not utilizing Reddit’s content to train its AI models and claimed that it would comply with Reddit’s established protocols for crawler access as set out in its robots.txt file. However, the lawsuit asserts that these assurances were contradicted by subsequent evidence: shortly after the correspondence, the presence of Reddit citations within Perplexity’s outputs not only persisted but noticeably increased. To further substantiate its claims, Reddit allegedly created a “honeypot” experiment—a hidden post accessible solely to Google’s crawlers. Within only a few hours, according to the company, Perplexity’s system had reproduced the material of that restricted page, thereby suggesting that its data pipeline relied heavily on scraping intermediary search results rather than direct Reddit access.
Reddit thus concludes that the only plausible explanation for how Perplexity acquired and repurposed that exclusive content is that either it or its co-defendants harvested the data indirectly by scraping Google’s search engine result pages for Reddit material, which Perplexity subsequently incorporated almost immediately into its answer engine. At the heart of this dispute lies the immense value of Reddit’s data itself—millions of human-generated posts, discussions, and comment threads that represent authentic collective knowledge and organic ranking through human interaction. Such data is extraordinarily valuable for training artificial intelligence models, a fact Reddit has long been aware of. Indeed, the company’s widely discussed 2023 API policy changes, which sparked significant user protests, were framed as an attempt to ensure adequate compensation for third-party access to this content. Since then, Reddit has entered into formal data licensing agreements with major technology firms including OpenAI and Google and is said to be seeking improved terms as the demand for training data grows more competitive. Moreover, Reddit has previously undertaken legal actions against Anthropic, another AI developer, alleging that its automated systems continued to extract Reddit information after the company had pledged to refrain from doing so.
Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, amplified these concerns in an official statement accompanying the lawsuit. He described a global technological landscape in which AI developers are engaged in what he called an “arms race” to obtain high-quality human-generated content, a competition that has given rise to an “industrial-scale data-laundering economy.” According to Lee, unscrupulous scrapers exploit sophisticated methods to bypass technical restrictions, illegally collecting proprietary data before reselling it to companies eager to enrich their machine learning systems. Reddit’s massive archive of authentic human conversation, he noted, makes it an especially tempting target for such misconduct. Lee further characterized the defendants—specifically Oxylabs UAB, AWMProxy, and SerpAI—as paradigmatic examples of this illicit ecosystem, describing their operations in vivid terms: a Lithuanian scraping enterprise, a former botnet with Russian roots, and a company that openly markets its ability to evade online protections. Unable to scrape Reddit’s platform directly due to security barriers, these entities, according to Lee, disguise their identities, obscure their digital origins, and misrepresent their crawler software in order to harvest Reddit’s content indirectly from Google’s search results. He maintained that Perplexity, as a paying client of at least one such provider, had consciously chosen to rely on unlawfully obtained material rather than engaging in legitimate negotiation with Reddit itself.
Perplexity, for its part, has denied receiving formal notice of the lawsuit at the time of the reporting. Jesse Dwyer, the company’s head of communications, commented to The Verge that Perplexity remains steadfast in its commitment to fighting for users’ rights to freely and fairly access information available on the open internet. Dwyer emphasized that Perplexity’s operational philosophy centers on principled and responsible use of artificial intelligence to deliver accurate, fact-based answers. He further asserted that the company will continue to defend openness and the public interest, rejecting any attempts that it perceives as threats to transparency or the free dissemination of knowledge.
The outcome of Reddit’s case against Perplexity and its alleged data-scraping partners may ultimately help define the evolving legal and ethical boundaries surrounding AI training data—boundaries that hinge on consent, ownership, and the permissible use of publicly visible yet privately governed online content.
Sourse: https://www.theverge.com/news/804660/reddit-suing-perplexity-data-scrapers-ai-lawsuit
