Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity and several data collection intermediaries, alleging that its content was being «circumvented» by the platform and used in AI-powered replies and products.
Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity and several data collection intermediaries, alleging that its content was being «circumvented» by the platform and used in AI-powered replies and products.
The lawsuit also targets three intermediaries that help collect data in bulk: SerpApi, Oxylabs, and AWMProxy, according to The Verge. The lawsuit alleges that when direct access to Reddit was restricted, the suspects took the desired text in a roundabout way (for example, from Google search results) and passed it on to their clients. Reddit says Perplexity used at least one of these services instead of entering into a direct licensing agreement.
In May 2024, Reddit sent Perplexity a formal warning to stop scraping content. Perplexity responded that it respected robots.txt and did not train its models on Reddit data, but according to the plaintiff, the service’s responses even more frequently referenced content from the platform. To test the circumvention, Reddit published a post that only Google could index, and soon saw its content on Perplexity. This is cited as the main evidence of «search-based circumvention.»
Perplexity said it has not yet received a lawsuit and will «robustly defend users’ right to free and fair access to public knowledge.» Reddit responded: the AI market has turned into a «race for high-quality human content,» and therefore transparent agreements and payments to copyright holders are needed. Back. The platform already monetizes data via APIs and has agreements with OpenAI and Google, and previously sued Anthropic. The new case could be another step towards rules where public texts are used for AI only under license.
Previously, dev.ua wrote about how Reddit Answers found itself in the spotlight after forum moderators complained that the artificial intelligence tool was providing dangerous medical advice that they could not disable or hide.
