Reddit Files Lawsuit Against Perplexity Over Data Access

Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity and three data-scraping firms in New York federal court, alleging that they bypassed access controls to obtain Reddit content on a large scale. Perplexity responded by stating that it summarizes Reddit discussions with citations and does not train AI models on Reddit content.

The lawsuit names Oxylabs UAB, AWMProxy, and SerpApi as intermediaries, claiming that Perplexity is a customer of SerpApi and used its services to circumvent controls and copy Reddit data. Reddit created a test post crawlable only by Google's search engine, which appeared in Perplexity's results within hours.

The legal questions involve whether technical controls were bypassed, if summarization infringes on protected expressions, and whether using third-party scrapers could lead to legal liability. If Reddit's anti-circumvention argument is accepted, changes in how AI assistants cite Reddit threads may occur.

Perplexity views Reddit's lawsuit as leverage in broader training-data negotiations, stating it will not participate in extortion between Reddit and Google. This issue is significant as it affects how AI assistants use forum content, impacting both readers and publishers.