Social media platform Reddit is suing artificial intelligence company Perplexity AI and three other entities, alleging they are engaging in an “industrial-scale, illicit” economy and “illegally harvesting” the comments of millions of Reddit users for commercial purposes.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in New York, targets Perplexity, a San Francisco-based AI chatbot and “response engine” that competes with Google, ChatGPT and others.
Reddit claims that the companies are stealing content by circumventing Reddit’s anti-data harvesting measures and “bypassing Google’s oversight and scraping Reddit content directly from Google’s search results.”
The company also alleges that Perplexity is a “voluntary customer” of such data harvesters, choosing to receive the stolen data rather than entering into a legal agreement with Reddit, as many other companies have done.
Reddit is seeking unspecified monetary damages and a court order to prohibit Perplexity from using its content. Perplexity said it was not yet aware of the lawsuit but that it would "always fight vigorously for our users' right to free and fair access to public knowledge."
Reddit has previously signed licensing agreements with companies such as Google and OpenAI to use its data for AI training. The lawsuit will set legal standards for training AI models on publicly available web data.
