Social media platform Reddit filed suit in New York federal court against Perplexity AI and three data-scraping firms, alleging “industrial-scale” scraping of Reddit user content to train AI systems. Reddit’s chief legal officer Ben Lee described an alleged “data laundering” economy in a statement.
The complaint names Oxylabs (Lithuania), AWMProxy (Russia) and SerpApi (Texas). Reddit alleges the firms bypassed anti-scraping protections and harvested Reddit content from Google search results, then provided the material to Perplexity, which it claims does not have a Reddit license.
Reddit further alleges it ran a test by posting content visible only to Google’s crawler and that the material appeared in Perplexity’s results within hours, according to the complaint. The filing also states that Perplexity’s citations to Reddit increased “forty-fold” after a cease-and-desist.
Perplexity said it will “fight vigorously for users’ rights to freely and fairly access public knowledge.” Oxylabs said it was “shocked and disappointed,” while SerpApi said it strongly disagrees with Reddit’s allegations; AWMProxy could not be reached for comment.
Reddit says it licenses its content to Google and OpenAI; some outlets have reported those deals are about $60 million. The company also sued Anthropic in June over similar claims.
