Reddit Sues AI Firms for Scraping User Comments

On October 23, 2025, Reddit filed lawsuits against several companies, alleging a large-scale effort to scrape information from its platform, this time targeting user comments. The defendants named in the federal lawsuit filed in New York include Perplexity, the San Francisco-based AI chatbot maker; Lithuania-based Oxylabs UAB; Russian web domain company AWMProxy; and Texas-based SerpApi.

This is not the first time Reddit has taken legal action against companies it accuses of exploiting its content. In June 2025, the platform sued Anthropic for "unlawfully exploiting" its content to train the Claude AI model without consent. The new lawsuits focus on smaller companies that gather chatbot-training data from the internet, including Reddit, which the platform says is "one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created."

The lawsuits claim the defendants have bypassed protocols to sell the scraped data to clients for training purposes, constituting copyright violations, unfair competition, and unjust enrichment. Perplexity has stated that it will "fight vigorously for users' rights to freely and fairly access public knowledge," but has not yet responded to the lawsuit.