Reddit is done playing nice with AI startups. The social media giant has taken Perplexity to court, accusing it of secretly taking Reddit’s data to make its chatbot smarter, and it’s not the first time Reddit’s had to do this. Reddit’s lawsuit against Perplexity Reddit filed a lawsuit in a New York federal court against AI search company Perplexity and three other firms, claiming they illegally scraped Reddit’s content to train Perplexity’s AI-based “answer engine.” According to the complaint, these companies allegedly bypassed Reddit’s safety systems to pull massive amounts of data that Perplexity “desperately needs” to run its chatbot. Not Reddit’s first AI fight This isn’t Reddit’s first courtroom battle over AI data. The company filed a similar case earlier this year against another AI startup, Anthropic, which is still ongoing. Reddit argues that its vast collection of user discussions, spread across thousands of topic-based “subreddits,” has become one of the most used sources for AI-generated answers online. Reddit’s stance: Protecting the community’s content Reddit’s Chief Legal Officer, Ben Lee, didn’t hold back, saying: AI companies are locked in an arms race for quality human content — and that pressure has fueled an industrial-scale ‘data laundering’ economy. The platform said it has already licensed its content to companies like Google and OpenAI, but claims Perplexity has no such agreement. Reddit also alleges that data-scraping companies Oxylabs (Lithuania), AWMProxy (Russia), and SerpApi (Texas) collected Reddit data from billions of search results and supplied it to Perplexity. How Perplexity and others responded Perplexity, however, pushed back on the accusations, saying in a statement: 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. SerpApi said it “strongly disagrees” with Reddit’s claims and will defend itself in court. Oxylabs added that it was “shocked and disappointed” by Reddit’s lawsuit, saying the platform never reached out to them before taking legal action. AWMProxy, on the other hand, has not commented. Reddit’s next move Reddit claims it even sent a cease-and-desist notice to Perplexity last year, but instead of backing off, Perplexity allegedly increased its use of Reddit data fortyfold. The company is now asking the court to order Perplexity to stop using its data and to award unspecified damages..
