Reddit has initiated legal action against Perplexity AI and three data-scraping companies, alleging the unlawful harvesting of its user data. The lawsuit, filed in a New York federal court, accuses Perplexity of using scraped data to train its AI models without permission. Reddit claims the defendants circumvented its data protection measures to access content, despite lacking a license.
The social media platform asserts that Perplexity's citations to Reddit content increased significantly after being told to stop. Reddit argues that while some AI companies have licensing agreements for data access, Perplexity has not. The data-scraping firms named in the suit are Oxylabs, AWMProxy, and SerpApi, accused of extracting Reddit content through Google search results and reselling it. Reddit seeks financial compensation and an injunction to halt the unauthorised data collection.
Perplexity has responded, asserting its commitment to providing fair access to public knowledge and vowing to defend users' rights. This legal action follows a similar suit Reddit filed against Anthropic earlier in the year, highlighting the growing tension around data usage in the AI sector.
