Reddit Sues Perplexity and Data Brokers for ‘Industrial-Scale’ Scraping

Reddit has filed legal action against Perplexity, SerApi, OxyLabs and AWMProxy, accusing them of unauthorised data scraping and the illicit use of Reddit content to train AI systems, following an earlier suit against Anthropic over Reddit data.

The company says its vast repository of posts and user interactions is now monetised by licensing access to AI firms for model training, with Perplexity allegedly scraping data mainly to train its own models and the others harvesting and reselling Reddit data to various AI developers. Reddit asserts that the defendants bypassed restrictions via technical workarounds and that Perplexity violated the robots.txt protocol, despite clear disallowance from Reddit.

The platform has issued a cease‑and‑desist order demanding an immediate halt to unauthorised scraping, and independent testing has shown Perplexity’s chatbot continuing to reference Reddit content in responses, a contradiction to its public claims. Perplexity stated that it has not yet received the lawsuit, according to The Verge.