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Investing.com -- Reddit Inc (NYSE:RDDT) has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI and three data scraping companies for allegedly collecting and using Reddit data without permission.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan, claims that Oxylabs UAB, AWMProxy, and SerpApi have been collecting Reddit data through Google search results to resell it. According to the complaint, Perplexity AI has been purchasing this data from at least one of these companies.
Reddit alleges these companies are circumventing its technological barriers by scraping data from Google’s search engine results instead of directly from Reddit. The complaint states that during a two-week period in July 2025, the three data scraping defendants accessed almost three billion search engine results pages containing Reddit content.
The social media platform claims it caught Perplexity "red-handed" using Reddit data acquired through scraping Google search results, despite sending the company a cease-and-desist letter. According to the lawsuit, Perplexity’s citations to Reddit increased forty-fold after being told to stop.
Reddit argues that some major AI companies like OpenAI and Google have properly entered into agreements to access Reddit data while protecting user rights, but the defendants chose not to follow this path.
The lawsuit cites violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits circumventing technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. Reddit is seeking to end what it describes as the defendants’ "circumvention of security measures" and "blatant misuse of Reddit content."
Reddit stock is down 6.6% today amid AI bubble concerns. Earlier in the year, Reddit sued another AI startup leader, Anthropic, in California court for similar data scrapping violations.