{"id":4974,"date":"2025-10-23T13:48:57","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T13:48:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.stanventures.com\/news\/?p=4974"},"modified":"2025-10-30T11:08:27","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T11:08:27","slug":"reddit-sues-perplexity-ai-and-data-scrapers-for-stealing-content","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stanventures.com\/news\/reddit-sues-perplexity-ai-and-data-scrapers-for-stealing-content-4974\/","title":{"rendered":"Reddit Sues Perplexity AI and Data Scrapers for Stealing Content"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reddit has sued Perplexity AI and three data-scraping companies, accusing them of stealing millions of user posts to train artificial intelligence models. The lawsuit, filed October 22, 2025, in New York federal court, could set a major precedent for how human conversations online are treated in the age of AI.<\/b><\/p>\n

\"Reddit<\/p>\n

Update:<\/strong> Perplexity AI has responded<\/a> to Reddit\u2019s lawsuit, saying it does not train its models on Reddit data. The company claims it only summarizes Reddit discussions with citations, similar to how users share links. Reddit maintains that Perplexity and its scraping partners bypassed protections to access content, citing a fortyfold increase in Reddit references after a cease-and-desist order.<\/em><\/p>\n

Reddit built its reputation as the internet\u2019s massive discussion board, a place where millions of people trade advice, share experiences, and argue about everything from cooking to coding. That same content has now become the focus of a major legal battle.<\/p>\n

This week, Reddit filed a lawsuit<\/a> against Perplexity AI and three companies (Oxylabs from Lithuania, AWMProxy from Russia, and SerpApi from Texas) accused of supplying it with scraped data.<\/p>\n

The lawsuit claims these companies secretly copied Reddit\u2019s user-generated posts through automated systems and sold that information to help train AI products without paying for it.<\/p>\n

The complaint describes the process as \u201cindustrial-scale data laundering.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reddit says the companies pretended to be ordinary web users, bypassed protective barriers, and gathered vast amounts of its data through Google\u2019s search results. The suit asks the court for damages and an injunction to stop the defendants from using Reddit\u2019s data again.<\/p>\n

Ben Lee, Reddit\u2019s chief legal officer, said the race to build powerful AI systems has pushed some developers to ignore boundaries. \u201cThere\u2019s enormous pressure to find high-quality human content,\u201d he said. \u201cThat pressure has created an underground market that thrives on stolen data.\u201d<\/p>\n

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