{"id":1502,"date":"2025-10-22T21:38:24","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T17:38:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.actutech.app\/reddit-sues-perplexity-for-allegedly-ripping-its-content-to-feed-ai\/"},"modified":"2025-10-22T21:38:24","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T17:38:24","slug":"reddit-sues-perplexity-for-allegedly-ripping-its-content-to-feed-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/reddit-sues-perplexity-for-allegedly-ripping-its-content-to-feed-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Reddit sues Perplexity for allegedly ripping its content to feed AI"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Reddit is suing Perplexity and three \u201cdata-scraping service providers\u201d to \u201cstop the industrial-scale, unlawful circumvention of data protections by a group of bad actors who will stop at nothing to get their hands on valuable copyrighted content on Reddit,\u201d according to the complaint<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The company equates the data scraping companies \u2014 SerpApi, Oxylabs, and AWMProxy \u2014 to \u201cwould-be bank robbers\u201d who \u201cknowing they cannot get into the bank vault, break into the armored truck carrying the cash instead.\u201d Reddit alleges that Perplexity is a customer of \u201cat least one\u201d of the data scraping companies, saying that it \u201cwill apparently do anything to get the Reddit data it desperately needs to fuel its \u2018answer engine\u2019 \u2014 that is, anything other than<\/em> enter into an agreement with Reddit directly, as some of its competitors have done.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to the lawsuit, Reddit sent a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity in May 2024 \u201cdemanding that it stop scraping Reddit data.\u201d While Perplexity told Reddit at the time that it didn\u2019t use Reddit content to train AI models and that it would respect Reddit\u2019s robots.txt, after that letter, the volume of Reddit citations on Perplexity actually increased. Reddit also created a post that could only be crawled by Google, and \u201cwithin hours,\u201d Perplexity \u201c produced the contents\u201d of that post, the company says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe only way that Perplexity could have obtained that Reddit content and then used it in its \u2018answer engine\u2019 is if it and\/or its Co-Defendants scraped Google SERPs for that Reddit content and Perplexity then quickly incorporated that data into its answer engine,\u201d Reddit writes.<\/p>\n

Reddit\u2019s data \u2014 posts on all sorts of topics written by and ranked by humans \u2014 is hugely helpful to help train AI models, and the company knows it; the API changes<\/a> that sparked the 2023 protests<\/a> were positioned<\/a> as a way for the company to be compensated for that data. Reddit has struck deals with AI companies including OpenAI<\/a> and Google<\/a>, and it reportedly wants better ones<\/a>. And Reddit has previously taken legal action against Anthropic<\/a>, alleging that Anthropic\u2019s bots accessed Reddit\u2019s platform even after Anthropic said they wouldn\u2019t be doing that<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI companies are locked in an arms race for quality human content \u2014 and that pressure has fueled an industrial-scale \u2018data laundering\u2019 economy,\u201d Ben Lee, Reddit\u2019s chief legal officer, says in a statement. \u201cScrapers bypass technological protections to steal data, then sell it to clients hungry for training material. Reddit is a prime target because it\u2019s one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created.<\/p>\n

\u201cDefendants Oxylabs UAB, AWM Proxy, and SerpAI \u2014 a Lithuanian data scraper, a former Russian botnet, and a company that openly advertises its shady circumvention tactics \u2014 are textbook examples of this illegal behavior,\u201d Lee says. \u201cUnable to scrape Reddit directly, they mask their identities, hide their locations, and disguise their web scrapers to steal Reddit content from Google Search. Perplexity is a willing customer of at least one of these scrapers, choosing to buy stolen data rather than enter into a lawful agreement with Reddit itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cPerplexity has not yet received the lawsuit, but we will always fight vigorously for users\u2019 rights to freely and fairly access public knowledge,\u201d Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity\u2019s head of communication, tells The Verge<\/em>. \u201cOur approach remains principled and responsible as we provide factual answers with accurate AI, and we will not tolerate threats against openness and the public interest.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reddit is suing Perplexity and three \u201cdata-scraping service providers\u201d to \u201cstop the industrial-scale, unlawful circumvention of data protections by a […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-classe"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1502\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.actutech.app\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}