On October 22, 2025 (local time), social media giant Reddit lodged a lawsuit in a federal court located in New York. The defendants include the U.S.-based AI startup Perplexity and three other companies. Reddit alleges that these entities illegally scraped its data without proper authorization, using the information to train Perplexity's AI search engine.

The three companies involved in data scraping are Oxylabs UAB, AWMProxy, and SerpApi. These firms gather Reddit data via Google search results and then resell it. Perplexity is accused of having bought data from at least one of these companies.

It's worth noting that Reddit has already entered into data usage agreements with OpenAI and Alphabet. However, it has chosen to take legal action against those companies that operate without authorization. Earlier in the same year, Reddit initiated a similar lawsuit against Anthropic, highlighting its firm stance on protecting its data assets.