Reddit has filed a lawsuit in federal court in New York against artificial intelligence company Perplexity AI and three other entities, alleging the companies engaged in large-scale, unauthorized scraping of Reddit user comments for commercial purposes.
The suit targets Perplexity, which is based in San Francisco and operates an AI chatbot that competes with services such as Google and ChatGPT. Also named are Oxylabs UAB, a data-scraping firm from Lithuania; AWMProxy, described by Reddit as a “former Russian botnet”; and SerpApi, a Texas-based startup that lists Perplexity as a client.
This marks the second time Reddit has taken legal action against an AI company. In June, Reddit sued Anthropic for similar reasons. The latest lawsuit broadens its focus to include not just AI developers but also third-party data suppliers that facilitate data collection for training AI systems.
“Scrapers bypass technological protections to steal data, then sell it to clients hungry for training material. Reddit is a prime target because it’s one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created,” said Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer.
Reddit claims the defendants engaged in unfair competition and unjust enrichment and accuses some of violating U.S. copyright law. The platform argues these groups circumvented anti-scraping protections on its site and Google’s controls by scraping content directly from search engine results while masking their identities.
Lee added: “they mask their identities, hide their locations, and disguise their web scrapers to steal Reddit content from Google Search. 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 responded that it had not yet received the lawsuit but stated: “will always fight vigorously for users’ rights to freely and fairly access public knowledge. Our approach remains principled and responsible as we provide factual answers with accurate AI, and we will not tolerate threats against openness and the public interest.”
Ryan Schafer, SerpApi’s customer success director, commented via email: “We strongly disagree with Reddit’s allegations and intend to vigorously defend ourselves in court.”
Oxylabs issued a statement saying it was “shocked and disappointed” by the lawsuit. Denas Grybauskas, chief governance and strategy officer at Oxylabs said: “Oxylabs’ position is that no company should claim ownership of public data that does not belong to them. It is possible that it is just an attempt to sell the same public data at an inflated price.”
AWMProxy could not be reached for comment.
While businesses and researchers often scrape publicly available online information, Reddit likened these activities to criminals bypassing security barriers by targeting alternate sources rather than entering through official channels.
In addition to user-generated content like Wikipedia entries or news articles, platforms such as Reddit provide valuable written material for developing AI language models. To address this demand legally, Reddit has established licensing agreements with several major technology firms—including Google and OpenAI—that allow paid access to its vast database of user comments.
