Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity and three data-scraping firms for unauthorised data scraping to train AI models

Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity and three data-scraping firms, accusing them of illegally extracting Reddit content to train AI models. According to the complaint, the defendants allegedly circumvented Reddit’s security measures and collected copyrighted material on a large scale. Reddit says it sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist notice last year, but claims the company subsequently increased its use of Reddit data by a factor of forty.

The suit contends that Perplexity’s AI-powered answer engine heavily relies on Reddit data and that the company worked with at least one of the scraping firms without proper authorisation. Reddit is seeking financial compensation as well as a court injunction to stop Perplexity from using its content for future AI training or commercial products. The platform emphasises that its user-generated discussions are a valuable asset and often appear in AI-generated responses.

Notably, Reddit has previously struck paid licensing deals with Google and OpenAI to let them use its data for AI development—suggesting that the company’s main target is those who access the data without compensation. Perplexity denies any wrongdoing and says it plans to fight the case in court. The lawsuit follows a separate, ongoing case Reddit filed a few months earlier against Anthropic over similar data usage claims.