Reddit sues Perplexity AI and others over scraping comments

Reddit filed a lawsuit Wednesday in a New York federal court accusing Perplexity AI and three other entities of taking part in an industrial-scale effort to scrape and sell the comments of millions of Reddit users for commercial use. The complaint names San Francisco-based Perplexity, Lithuanian data-scraping firm Oxylabs UAB, a web domain identified by Reddit as AWMProxy, and Texas-based SerpApi, and alleges the defendants bypassed technical protections to harvest user content for training artificial intelligence systems.

According to the suit, the defendants used tools that evade Reddit’s anti-scraping measures and circumvented controls on Google Search to acquire content. Reddit’s chief legal officer, Ben Lee, said the platform is a particularly attractive target because it holds one of the largest, most dynamic collections of human conversation online. The complaint asserts that some firms mask identities, hide locations, and disguise web scrapers to pull Reddit material from search results, and that Perplexity knowingly purchased data from at least one scrapper rather than negotiating a licensing arrangement with Reddit.

Perplexity said it had not yet been served with the...