Reddit Sues Perplexity AI and Data Scrapers Over Copyrighted Content Use

Reddit Inc. has filed lawsuits against Perplexity AI Inc. and three data-scraping firms — SerpApi, Oxylabs, and AWMProxy — accusing them of illegally harvesting Reddit’s copyrighted content to train AI models.

The suits, lodged in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, mark the latest escalation in Reddit’s effort to protect its data assets amid the generative AI boom.

Earlier this year, Reddit filed a lawsuit against AI startup Anthropic, accusing it of using Reddit’s content to train its models without a proper licensing agreement.

In its filing, Reddit likened the scraping firms to “bank robbers,” alleging that one company “will apparently do anything to get Reddit data it desperately needs” — except pay for it.

According to the complaint, Reddit conducted a sting operation by posting a “test post” visible only to Google’s crawler. The content later appeared in Perplexity’s search results, suggesting direct scraping.

The platform noted that competitors like OpenAI and Google have already entered formal data-licensing agreements, reportedly worth tens of millions of dollars, to access Reddit’s vast content library.

Last month, Reddit, Quora, Yahoo, Medium, CNET, and others launched the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) protocol, an open, decentralised system designed to let AI companies legally scrape and use online content for training models.

Perplexity denied wrongdoing, stating it has not yet received the lawsuit and will “fight vigorously for users’ rights to freely and fairly access public knowledge.” The company said its AI remains “principled and responsible,” emphasising its commitment to openness and factual accuracy.