Reddit Sued Perplexity for Data Scraping—and Compared the Startup to a ‘North Korean Hacker’

On Wednesday, Reddit filed a lawsuit against AI company Perplexity and three other companies alleging the AI company illegally scraped Reddit data through the use of data scraping companies based in Europe and Texas. 

“AI companies are locked in an arms race for quality human content—and that pressure has fueled an industrial-scale ‘data laundering’ economy,” said Ben Lee, Reddit’s Chief Legal Officer, in a statement to Inc and other publications. “Reddit is a prime target because it’s one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created.”    

Reddit accused three data scraping companies Oxylabs UAB, AWM Proxy, and SerpApi of illegally scraping Reddit data and that Perplexity is a “willing customer of at least one of  its co-defendants.” The lawsuit also accused Perplexity of operating “akin to a “North Korean hacker.” It also alleged that AWM Proxy was a “former Russian botnet.”

Perplexity responded to Reddit’s lawsuit with a Reddit post on Wednesday night. In the post, Perplexity denied the allegations and said the suit was “a show of force in Reddit’s training data negotiations with Google and OpenAI.”  Reddit is currently renegotiating licensing deals with Google and OpenAI, and exploring a dynamic pricing model for licensing its content. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman owns an 8.7% stake in Reddit.

Perplexity also said that the company cannot sign a content licensing agreement because they “don’t train their AI models on content” and that it is already “lawfully accessing Reddit data.” 

 “We strongly disagree with Reddit’s allegations and intend to vigorously defend ourselves in court,” says Alex Barron, a spokesperson for SerpApi. “SerpApi stands firmly behind its business model and conduct.”

Denas Grybauskas, Oxylabs’ Chief Governance and Strategy Officer, says Reddit made no attempt to contact them before the lawsuit was filed. “Oxylabs’ position is that no company should claim ownership of public data that does not belong to them,” Grybauskas says. “It is possible that it is just an attempt to sell the same public data at an inflated price.”

AWM Proxy could not be reached for comment.

In June, Reddit sued Anthropic, another major AI company, over allegations that Anthropic stole data from Reddit to train its AI model.