Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI and three data scraping firms. It’s accusing them of harvesting Reddit content without authorization. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that the companies collected and resold data from Reddit’s discussion forums through automated tools. It reflects growing tensions between online platforms and artificial intelligence developers.
The suit names Perplexity AI, Oxylabs UAB, AWMProxy and SerpApi as defendants. Reddit said the firms allegedly obtained its data through Google search results. They then resold it to AI companies without consent or compensation. According to the filing, Perplexity purchased Reddit data from at least one of the scraping firms.
Reddit Chief Legal Officer Ben Lee said the lawsuit represents a wider challenge for the industry. AI models depend increasingly on high-quality, human-generated text. “AI companies are locked in an arms race for quality human content, and that pressure has fueled an industrial-scale data laundering economy,” Lee said in a statement quoted by Bloomberg.
AI’s Growing Appetite for Human Data
Reddit’s repository of public conversations has become a critical resource for training generative AI models. The company has already signed paid data-licensing deals with OpenAI and Google. These grants offer structured access to its posts and comment threads. But Reddit claims other firms are exploiting its data without authorization. The company says this practice undermines fair competition and creator rights.
Earlier this year, Reddit filed a similar case against Anthropic, alleging that the AI startup unlawfully used Reddit data to train its large language models. As PYMNTS reported, that lawsuit signaled Reddit’s effort to assert ownership over its collection of human conversation as the AI industry races to secure training data.
Data Scraping Governance and Legal Implications
The case, Reddit Inc. v. SerpApi LLC, 25-cv-08736, could help define how U.S. courts interpret the legality of web-scraped content used in AI model training. Spokespeople for Perplexity, SerpApi and Oxylabs did not respond to requests for comment
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Legal experts say Reddit’s lawsuit is part of a growing wave of disputes shaping data governance and compliance. As law firm Nelson Mullins noted, cases such as The New York Times v. OpenAI are forcing companies to reassess how they manage content ownership, consent and data provenance.
