According to Associated Press, social media platform Reddit filed a lawsuit on Wednesday in a federal court in New York against artificial intelligence company Perplexity AI and three affiliated entities, accusing them of "industrial-scale illegal scraping" to copy millions of Reddit user comments without permission for commercial gain.
In the lawsuit, Reddit stated that the defendants include Perplexity AI, based in San Francisco, Lithuanian data scraping company Oxylabs UAB, a suspected "former Russian botnet" domain AWMProxy, and US-based search service provider SerpApi. Reddit accused these companies of unfair competition, copyright infringement, and unjust enrichment, claiming they bypassed protective mechanisms to scrape Reddit content from Google search results and used proxy tools to conceal their identities.
Ben Lee, Reddit's Chief Legal Officer, said that these companies were "like potential bank robbers" breaking into a "armored truck" to steal data. Reddit has become a primary target because it possesses the "largest and most active collection of human conversations," he said. He added that Perplexity chose to purchase stolen data instead of obtaining authorization through legal means.
Perplexity responded that it had not yet received the lawsuit but stated it would "actively defend the public's right to fair access to knowledge" and emphasized that the company always responsibly uses AI. SerpApi and Oxylabs both denied the allegations, stating they would actively defend themselves. The latter emphasized that "public data should not be monopolized or sold at high prices." AWMProxy has not responded yet.
