Reddit Sues AI Firms Over Data Scraping

Reddit has filed a federal lawsuit aimed at stopping several companies from scraping its user-generated content to train artificial intelligence models, escalating tensions between social platforms and AI developers over access to valuable online data.

As first reported by The New York Times, the complaint – filed in U.S. District Court – names four defendants: SerpApi, Oxylabs, AWMProxy, and Perplexity AI. Reddit alleges that these firms bypassed its API and accessed Reddit discussions through Google’s cached search results to collect data without authorization. “Three of those companies- SerpApi; a Lithuanian start-up, Oxylabs; and a Russian company, AWMProxy – sold data to AI companies like OpenAI and Meta, according to the lawsuit. The fourth company, Perplexity, is a San Francisco start-up that makes an AI search engine.”

Reddit is seeking a permanent injunction to block the firms from further scraping activity and is pursuing financial damages. The company also aims to use the case to set a broader legal precedent for protecting digital content in the age of large-scale AI training.

The move follows Reddit’s 2023 overhaul of its API pricing, which limited free access and sought to ensure the platform could profit from the value of its user-generated discussions—data that has become particularly valuable to AI developers. Reddit’s community-driven forums provide detailed, human-curated insights that make them especially attractive for training conversational AI systems.