Overview
- Reddit’s federal complaint filed in Manhattan names Perplexity along with Oxylabs UAB, SerpApi and AWMProxy, alleging unlawful harvesting of Reddit content for AI uses.
- Reddit asserts the defendants circumvented technical controls by pulling Reddit material from Google search results, violating the DMCA and other laws, and it seeks an injunction and damages.
- The company says it sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist in May 2024, after which Perplexity’s citations to Reddit allegedly rose forty-fold.
- Perplexity denies wrongdoing, says it does not train models on Reddit content, defends summarizing public discussions, and in later statements called the lawsuit extortion; SerpApi and Oxylabs dispute the claims while AWMProxy could not be reached.
- Reddit underscores that it licenses data to firms like Google and OpenAI and notes a parallel lawsuit against Anthropic, positioning this case as a challenge to scraping intermediaries that supply AI companies.