New York: Reddit has filed a federal lawsuit against AI startup Perplexity, accusing the company of illegally scraping user data to train its AI-powered search engine.

The complaint, lodged in New York on Wednesday, alleges that Perplexity collaborated with data scraping firms, including Oxylabs, AWMProxy, and SerpApi, to bypass Reddit’s security measures and collect billions of posts and comments without permission. Reddit claims this content was then used to train Perplexity’s AI system, which provides instant answers to user queries.

Reddit stressed that it has licensed its data to major tech companies, such as Google and OpenAI, for AI development. The company said Perplexity’s unauthorized use undermines the value of its content and threatens the integrity of the online ecosystem.

Perplexity responded by emphasizing its commitment to factual AI-generated responses and criticized what it called the “industrial-scale data laundering economy,” pointing to pressure on AI firms to access high-quality human content.

This lawsuit follows a similar case Reddit filed earlier this year against AI startup Anthropic. Legal experts say the outcome could set an important precedent for AI development and the protection of online content creators.

The case highlights the growing tension between AI innovation and intellectual property rights, raising questions about how courts will balance technology advancement with content ownership.