Reddit Files Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Against Perplexity AI and Data Scraping Firms

Legal Action Over Alleged Data Scraping

Reddit has filed a lawsuit against four companies—SerApi, OxyLabs, AWMProxy, and Perplexity AI—for allegedly scraping its content without proper licensing agreements, according to reports from The New York Times. This legal action represents the platform’s continued effort to monetize its vast user-generated content, particularly as training data for artificial intelligence systems.

Legal Action Over Alleged Data Scraping
Monetization Strategy and Licensing Framework
Defendants and Alleged Violations
Evidence Gathering Techniques
Broader Industry Implications

The lawsuit follows similar legal proceedings against AI startup Anthropic, which sources indicate was also accused of using Reddit content to train its Claude chatbot without authorization. As of 2023, Reddit has implemented a formal charging structure for companies seeking access to its posts and other content, positioning its data as valuable material for AI training purposes.

Monetization Strategy and Licensing Framework

Reddit has reportedly established licensing partnerships with major technology firms including Google and OpenAI, while simultaneously developing its own AI-powered answer system. The company’s legal complaint argues that scraping search results for Reddit content circumvents these financial arrangements, undermining its data monetization strategy.

Analysts suggest this lawsuit reflects Reddit’s broader approach to protecting its intellectual property. The company has implemented technical measures including rate-limiting unknown bots and web crawlers in 2024, and plans to restrict the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine access to its platform beginning in August 2025. Additionally, Reddit has adopted the Really Simple Licensing standard, which embeds licensing terms directly within the robots.txt protocol that websites use to communicate scraping preferences.

Defendants and Alleged Violations

While SerApi, OxyLabs, and AWMProxy operate primarily in the data collection sector with less public recognition, Perplexity AI’s inclusion in the lawsuit has drawn particular attention. The AI company, which requires substantial data to train its models, has previously faced accusations of reproducing content without proper licensing and reportedly ignoring robots.txt protocols.

According to the report, Reddit had previously sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity requesting it stop scraping posts without a license. Although Perplexity claimed it didn’t use Reddit data, the company continued to cite the platform in its chatbot responses, the lawsuit alleges.

Evidence Gathering Techniques

Reddit engineers reportedly created a “test post” designed to be accessible only through Google’s search engine and otherwise unavailable elsewhere on the internet. Within hours of posting, queries to Perplexity’s answer engine were able to reproduce the specific content, according to the legal filing.

“The only way that Perplexity could have obtained that Reddit content and then used it in its ‘answer engine’ is if it and/or its co-defendants scraped Google [search results] for that Reddit content and Perplexity then quickly incorporated that data into its answer engine,” the lawsuit states, according to documents provided to Engadget.

Broader Industry Implications

This legal action occurs amid increasing tension between AI developers and content platforms regarding data sourcing practices. The outcome of this lawsuit could establish important precedents for how web scraping is regulated and how platforms can protect their content from unauthorized commercial use.

Reddit is seeking financial damages and a permanent injunction that would prevent the defendants from selling previously scraped Reddit material. The case highlights the growing value of user-generated content in training AI systems and the legal complexities surrounding data access in the artificial intelligence industry.