Perplexity Faces Lawsuit Over Reddit Data Scraping
▼ Summary
– Reddit sued Perplexity and data-scraping firms for bypassing access controls to obtain Reddit content at scale.
– Perplexity claims it only summarizes and cites Reddit discussions without training AI models on the content.
– Evidence in the complaint includes a hidden test post appearing in Perplexity’s results and a forty-fold citation increase after a cease-and-desist letter.
– Similar accusations from Forbes and Wired allege Perplexity used undisclosed crawlers to bypass website restrictions.
– The lawsuit raises legal questions about circumventing technical controls and the use of forum content by AI assistants.
A major legal battle has emerged between Reddit and the AI company Perplexity, centering on accusations of unauthorized data collection. Reddit has initiated a lawsuit in a New York federal court against Perplexity and three data-scraping firms, alleging they deliberately bypassed access controls to harvest Reddit content on a massive scale. The complaint suggests this was accomplished partly by scraping data directly from Google search results.
In a public statement, Perplexity defended its practices, asserting that its platform summarizes Reddit discussions and provides citations, clarifying that it does not use Reddit content to train its AI models. This stance aligns with the company’s previous public comments. However, it remains uncertain whether this defense directly counters the specific technical allegations detailed in Reddit’s legal filing.
The lawsuit identifies Oxylabs UAB, AWMProxy, and SerpApi as the intermediary scraping services involved. It specifically claims that Perplexity is a customer of SerpApi and utilized its services to evade technical barriers and copy data from Reddit.
The core of Perplexity’s argument rests on a technical distinction. The company maintains it only summarizes and cites discussions, rather than using the posts for model training. A representative from Perplexity stated, “We summarize Reddit discussions, and we cite Reddit threads in answers, just like people share links to posts here all the time.”
Reddit’s complaint, however, presents evidence that challenges this narrative. According to the legal documents, Reddit engineers created a unique test post configured to be accessible only to Google’s search crawler and hidden from the rest of the internet. This concealed content reportedly appeared within Perplexity’s search results just hours after being posted. The filing further notes that after Reddit sent a cease-and-desist letter, the volume of Perplexity’s citations to Reddit content surged by approximately forty times.
Perplexity has faced similar accusations from other publishers. Forbes previously alleged that the AI company republished one of its exclusive articles and threatened legal action. A report from Wired claimed that Perplexity used hidden IP addresses and spoofed user-agent strings to circumvent robots.txt directives. Additionally, Cloudflare conducted tests and later reported that Perplexity employed “stealth, undeclared crawlers” that ignored explicit instructions not to crawl certain webpages.
In response to past disputes, Perplexity has typically attributed problems to early-stage product issues and committed to providing clearer content attribution. The company has also argued that some media outlets are attempting to control information that constitutes publicly reported facts. In its most recent rebuttal regarding the Reddit lawsuit, Perplexity framed the legal action as a tactical maneuver in wider negotiations over training data, stating, “We summarize Reddit discussions… We won’t be extorted, and we won’t help Reddit extort Google.”
The outcome of this case carries significant implications for how AI assistants utilize content from online forums, which are frequently read by users and cited by publishers. The legal questions extend far beyond simple model training. Courts will likely need to determine whether technical access controls were illegally bypassed, if the act of summarization infringes on copyright-protected expression, and whether employing third-party scraping services creates legal liability for the companies that use the resulting data.
Should the courts side with Reddit’s anti-circumvention argument, it could force AI assistants to fundamentally change how they cite or link to Reddit threads. Conversely, a ruling in favor of Perplexity’s interpretation could encourage AI platforms to rely more heavily on forum discussions that operate outside strict licensing frameworks.
Important details remain unclear from the public complaint. While the filing alleges Perplexity obtained data through at least one scraping vendor, it does not specify which firm supplied particular datasets or include the financial transaction details between the companies.
(Source: Search Engine Journal)
