Reddit Sues Perplexity AI Over Alleged Data Scraping Scheme
Reddit has filed a federal lawsuit against Perplexity AI and several data partners, accusing them of orchestrating an industrial-scale scraping operation. The social media platform alleges the defendants bypassed both Reddit's and Google's protective measures to extract billions of search pages containing user-generated content.
The complaint names SerpApi, Oxylabs, and AWM Proxy as co-defendants, claiming they developed specialized tools to circumvent security protocols. These tools allegedly enabled unauthorized access to nearly three billion search engine results pages containing Reddit data.
The case highlights growing tensions between content platforms and AI companies over data sourcing practices. Reddit's MOVE comes as the platform prepares for an IPO, signaling its intent to aggressively protect what it views as proprietary user-generated content.
