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Published on
October 23, 2025
5 min read
Perplexity Faces Legal Action as Reddit Sues for Data Scraping in New York
In Focus
- Reddit has sued AI startup Perplexity for scraping its content
- Social media platform alleges that Perplexity uses its content to train its AI models
- Reddit also sued AWMProxy, Oxylabs, and SerpApi for aiding Perplexity AI
- Reddit filed the legal suit in New York
Reddit has sued Perplexity for illegally scraping user posts on its platform and using them to train its AI model. According to CNBC, Reddit filed the lawsuit in federal court in New York on October 22, 2025.
Reddit’s data scraping lawsuit is the latest highlight of the data-clash between publishers and AI firms. The social media giant also sued AWMProxy, Oxylabs, and SerpApi. According to Reddit, the three entities facilitated Perplexity’s AI content scraping efforts by hiding their locations, identities and disguising their web scrapers.
Perplexity Denies Reddit Claims
Perplexity has denied Reddit’s allegations and accused the social media giant of extortion. In a post shared on Reddit, the AI startup said it does not train its AI models on content. The company claims that it only cites summaries of the public discussions from the platform, which it says makes licensing agreements difficult.
“A year ago, after explaining this, Reddit insisted we pay anyway, despite lawfully accessing Reddit data. Bowing to strong arm tactics just isn’t how we do business. Perplexity believes this is a sad example of what happens when public data becomes a big part of a public company’s business model,” Perplexity said in a statement.
Perplexity added that Reddit has made data licensing a key source of revenue, claiming that its lawsuit is a “show of force in Reddit’s training data negotiations with Google and OpenAI.”
One of the defendants in the lawsuit, SerpApia, also disagreed with Reddit’s claims and says that it will defend itself in court. In 2025, Reddit introduced an AI-powered feature that generates answers by curating user posts. With this feature, users can find responses based on their posts. Reddit’s AI chatbot feature was part of the company’s plan to improve the way the users search the platform.
Reddit’s Push for AI Licensing Deals
Reddit has been working to secure AI licensing deals with AI firms. In February 2025, Reddit CCO Jen Wong said its deals with OpenAI and Google contributed to about 10% of the company’s revenue.
The latest lawsuit is among many legal actions relating to copyright issues in AI training data taken by publishers. In October 2024, publishers in New York sued Perplexity for copyright infringement. In the lawsuit, the New York Post and Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones alleged that the AI startup engages in illegal copying of their copyrighted content.
Reddit Perplexity Lawsuit at a Glance
- Reddit has massive volumes of user-generated data
- The social giant accused Perplexity of citing user posts on AI-generated responses
- Perplexity AI has denied Reddit’s data scraping accusations
- SerpApia disagreed with Reddit’s claims
Perplexity Ignored Reddit’s Cease-and-Desist Letter
Reddit hosts more than 100,000 communities on its platform. In the lawsuit against Perplexity, the social media platform claims that its user posts are cited regularly on Perplexity’s AI-generated responses. Reddit further claims that Perplexity ignored its cease-and-desist letter and instead increased citations forty times more.
Reddit has led the conversation about content scraping by AI firms due to its massive volume of user-generated data. Scrapers gain access to online content and sell it to AI companies, which in turn use unauthorized Reddit data used to train.
AI companies are “locked in an arms race for quality human content” and that pressure has fueled an “industrial-scale ‘data laundering’ economy,” Reddit Chief Legal Officer Ben Lee, AI firms said in a statement sent to CNBC.
In June 2025, the social media platform filed a lawsuit against Anthropic alleging that the AI firm was using its data and platform unlawfully. Reddit launched a powerful toll called the Community Intelligence suite to grow its advertising platform. The move reflected Reddit’s decision to leverage real-time user conversations to give brands access to smarter insights.
