The American operator of one of the most visited internet discussion forums, Reddit, is suing the start-up Perplexity AI, accusing it of illegally downloading its users’ content for artificial intelligence (AI) training. Reuters reported this, citing court documents.
Reddit vs. Perplexity
According to media reports, Reddit claims that Perplexity, along with several smaller companies, systematically circumvented its protective measures and masked the identity of its tools in order to gain access to protected data. “AI companies are competing in a race for high-quality human-generated content, and this pressure is fueling a widespread ‘data laundering’ economy across the industry,” Reddit’s chief legal officer Ben Lee told Reuters.
Reddit, which contains thousands of themed discussions, known as subreddits, said in the lawsuit that it is the most frequently cited source of answers to user questions generated by artificial intelligence. The company has licensed its content to companies such as Google and OpenAI, which operate the Gemini and ChatGPT chatbots.
In addition to Perplexity, the lawsuit also targets Lithuanian company Oxylabs, Texas start-up SerpApi, and former Russian botnet network AWMProxy. Reddit accuses them of providing services that were supposed to help with hidden content downloads. When asked by the Financial Times (FT), Perplexity said it had not yet officially received the lawsuit and that it would vigorously defend users’ right to free and fair access to public information. It accused Reddit of attacking openness and the public interest.
AI companies face lawsuits
Two FT sources said that Reddit had previously warned Perplexity about possible data misuse and offered the company a paid partnership agreement similar to the one it has with Google and OpenAI. However, according to the FT, Perplexity founder Aravind Srinivas rejected the agreement. In recent months and years, courts have received dozens of lawsuits involving dozens of cases of copyrighted text being used in generative AI training. Reddit, which went public in March 2024, sued Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, in June.
In September, the American media group Penske Media sued Google, part of the Alphabet group, for AI summaries that appear at the top of search results. It claims that they illegally use reports from its titles such as Rolling Stone and The Hollywood Reporter. Anthropic recently agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit brought by a group of writers. They accused the company of using their books to train the Claude chatbot without their consent.
Source: Reuters
