It seems that Perplexity AI is once again in the midst of controversy involving a name from the Big Tech. Social media platform Reddit has filed a federal lawsuit against the AI search startup and three other data-scraping firms, escalating a legal battle over the rights to internet content used to train generative AI models.
The complaint, filed in a US District Court in New York, accuses the defendants of engaging in an industrial-scale, unlawful operation to harvest user posts and comments, violating US copyright laws and circumventing digital defenses.
The lawsuit alleges that Perplexity is a “willing customer” of a new “data laundering economy.” Reddit named three co-defendants — Lithuania-based Oxylabs UAB, Texas-based SerpApi, and AWMProxy (described as a former Russian botnet) — who allegedly worked to bypass Reddit’s anti-scraping technology.
Reddit goes after Perplexity and others for data scraping
In the lawsuit, Reddit claims the scraping firms circumvented the company’s protection measures and pulled content by “circumventing Google’s controls and scraping Reddit content directly from Google’s search engine results.” The company says it was able to prove this by setting a hidden “test post” on its platform, which later appeared in Perplexity’s generated answers.
Reddit’s Chief Legal Officer, Ben Lee, stated that the pressure for training data has “fueled an industrial-scale ‘data laundering’ economy.” Reddit’s vast archive of human discussion is considered highly valuable, and the company has previously secured lucrative, paid licensing deals for its data with major players like Google and OpenAI. The lawsuit suggests Perplexity opted to acquire “stolen data” rather than enter a lawful agreement.
Reddit is seeking unspecified monetary damages and a permanent court order to block the unauthorised use of its content, in a case that is expected to further define the legal standards for training AI models on publicly available web data.
Perplexity says it will play fair but won’t cave in
In a public statement on its subreddit, Perplexity has made its take public on the aftermath and defined its plans to tackle the situation without giving in to Reddit’s demands. In an elaborate post, the startup said, “Whenever anyone asks us about content licensing, we explain that Perplexity, as an application-layer company, does not train AI models on content. Never has. So it is impossible for us to sign a license agreement to do so. 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.”
Following that, Perplexity added, “We summarise Reddit discussions, and we cite Reddit threads in answers, just like people share links to posts here all the time. Perplexity invented citations in AI for two reasons: so that you can verify the accuracy of the AI-generated answers, and so you can follow the citation to learn more and expand your journey of curiosity.”
“Reddit changed its mind this week on whether they want Perplexity users to find your public content on their journeys of learning. Reddit thinks that’s their right. But it is the opposite of an open internet.,” said Perplexity in a strong statement.
Perplexity says that it won’t cave in to the demand of a bigger firm like Reddit and will also try to help Google not get extorted in the process.
