Reddit Sues Perplexity, Other AI Companies for Scraping User Comments
Reddit has sued AI company Perplexity and three other companies, accusing them of a large-scale effort to scrape information – and this time, it’s in the comments.
The federal lawsuit, filed Wednesday in New York, names four defendants, including Perplexity, the San Francisco-based AI chatbot maker geared toward web search; Lithuania-based Oxylabs UAB; Russian web domain company AWMProxy and Texas-based SerpApi.
The lawsuit accuses scrapers of using “shady circumvention tactics” to bypass protocols to sell data to clients for training, and has made Reddit a prime target “because it’s one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created.” Claims include copyright violations, unfair competition and unjust enrichment.
“Reddit has rules,” the lawsuit states. “It does not permit unauthorized commercialization of Reddit content absent an express agreement with guardrails in place to ensure that Reddit and its users’ rights are protected. In short, if AI companies want to legally access Reddit data, they need to comply with Reddit’s policies.”
Reddit says companies like OpenAI and Google have done that, entering into agreements that allow access to data while ensuring safety of its users. “That is not the path Defendants have chosen,” the filing states.
In a separate lawsuit filed in June, Reddit sued Anthropic for “unlawfully exploiting” its content to train its Claude artificial intelligence model without its consent. The new lawsuit, obtained by TheWrap, also focuses on smaller companies that gather chatbot-training data from the internet.
Perplexity did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but told the AP that it will “fight vigorously for users’ rights to freely and fairly access public knowledge.”
