Reddit sues Perplexity and three different corporations for allegedly utilizing its content material with out paying

Reddit is suing corporations SerApi, OxyLabs, AWMProxy and Perplexity for allegedly scraping its knowledge from search outcomes and utilizing it and not using a license, The New York Times reports. The brand new lawsuit follows legal action in opposition to AI startup Anthropic, who allegedly used Reddit content material to coach its Claude chatbot.

As of 2023, Reddit charges companies trying entry to posts and different content material within the hopes of making a living on knowledge that might be used for AI coaching. The corporate has additionally signed licensing offers with corporations like Google and OpenAI, and even constructed an AI answer machine of its own to leverage the data in customers’ posts. Scraping search outcomes for Reddit content material avoids these funds, which is why the corporate is looking for monetary damages and a everlasting injunction that forestalls corporations from promoting beforehand scraped Reddit materials.

A number of the corporations Reddit is targeted on, like SerApi, OxyLabs and AWMProxy, will not be precisely family names, however they’ve all made accumulating knowledge from search outcomes and promoting it a key a part of their enterprise. Perplexity’s inclusion within the lawsuit could be extra apparent. The AI firm wants knowledge to coach its fashions, and has already been caught seemingly copying and regurgitating materials it hasn’t paid to license. That additionally contains reportedly ignoring the robots.txt protocol, a means for web sites to speak that they do not need their materials scraped.

Per a replica of the lawsuit offered to Engadget, Reddit had already despatched a cease-and-desist to Perplexity asking it to cease scraping posts and not using a license. The corporate claimed it did not use Reddit knowledge, however it additionally continued to quote the platform in solutions from its chatbot. Reddit says it was in a position to show Perplexity was utilizing scraped Reddit content material by making a “check put up” that “might solely be crawled by Google’s search engine and was not in any other case accessible anyplace on the web.” Inside just a few hours, queries made to Perplexity’s reply engine had been in a position to reproduce the content material of the put up.

“The one means that Perplexity might have obtained that Reddit content material after which used it in its ‘reply engine’ is that if it and/or its co-defendants scraped Google [search results] for that Reddit content material and Perplexity then shortly included that knowledge into its reply engine,” the lawsuit claims.

When requested to remark, Perplexity offered the next assertion:

Perplexity has not but acquired the lawsuit, however we’ll at all times struggle vigorously for customers’ rights to freely and pretty entry public data. Our strategy stays principled and accountable as we offer factual solutions with correct AI, and we won’t tolerate threats in opposition to openness and the general public curiosity.

This new lawsuit suits with the aggressive stance Reddit has taken in direction of defending its knowledge, together with rate-limiting unknown bots and internet crawlers in 2024, and even limiting what entry the Web Archive’s Wayback Machine has to its web site in August 2025. The corporate has additionally sought to outline new phrases round how web sites are crawled by adopting the Really Simple Licensing standard, which provides licensing phrases to robots.txt.