Reddit has filed a lawsuit against AI startup Perplexity, accusing the company of illegally scraping and using Reddit’s forum content to train and enhance its artificial intelligence products. The complaint also targets several data collection intermediaries — SerpApi, Oxylabs, and AWMProxy — which allegedly facilitated large-scale data harvesting that violated Reddit’s terms of service.
According to The Verge, the lawsuit claims that Perplexity accessed Reddit data “through backdoors”, bypassing the platform’s restrictions on web crawlers. When Reddit limited direct access to its site, these intermediaries allegedly extracted forum posts indirectly from Google search results and other cached pages, then supplied the data to Perplexity. Reddit argues that the AI firm used this material in its AI-generated responses and applications, instead of signing a proper licensing agreement like other tech companies.
In May 2024, Reddit reportedly sent a formal cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity, demanding that the company stop collecting content from its platform. Perplexity responded that it respects robots.txt protocols — the web standard used to block automated scraping — and denied training its models on Reddit data. However, Reddit contends that references to its posts increased even further after the warning. To confirm the alleged circumvention, Reddit ran a test by posting a unique, Google-indexed-only thread, which later appeared in Perplexity’s responses — serving as key evidence of what Reddit describes as “scraping through search.”
Perplexity has publicly stated that it has not yet received the lawsuit but will “vigorously defend users’ rights to fair and open access to public information.” The company maintains that AI development depends on publicly available knowledge and that excessive data restrictions threaten innovation.
For Reddit, however, the issue centers on data ownership and fair compensation. The platform says the AI race has become a competition for quality human-generated content, and platforms that host such content should be paid for its use. The company already licenses its API data to OpenAI and Google and has previously filed similar claims against Anthropic, the AI firm behind Claude.
Industry analysts view this case as potentially pivotal in defining legal boundaries for AI data usage. If Reddit wins, it could set a precedent requiring AI companies to secure explicit content licenses before training their models — effectively reshaping how AI firms access and process public online information.
Conclusion:
The Reddit vs. Perplexity lawsuit underscores a growing legal and ethical battle over the use of user-generated content in AI training. As generative AI expands, the industry faces a crucial question — who truly owns the data that powers artificial intelligence? Whether the court sides with Reddit or Perplexity, the outcome will likely influence the future framework for AI data rights, content licensing, and digital transparency.
