‘Would-Be Bank Robbers’: Reddit Escalates AI Data Wars With Perplexity Lawsuit

TITLE: Reddit’s Legal Gambit Against Perplexity AI Tests Boundaries of Data Ownership in Artificial Intelligence Era

Reddit Escalates AI Data Wars With Federal Lawsuit Alleging Systematic Content Theft

Reddit has launched a significant legal offensive against Perplexity AI, filing a federal lawsuit that accuses the artificial intelligence company of orchestrating an elaborate scheme to illegally scrape and profit from its user-generated content. The complaint, filed in a New York federal court, represents a critical test case for how platforms can protect their data in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

Reddit Escalates AI Data Wars With Federal Lawsuit Alleging Systematic Content Theft
The “Bank Robber” Analogy: A Deliberate Circumvention Strategy
Industrial-Scale Data Scraping Operations Revealed
The Evidence Trail: From Cease-and-Desist to Forty-Fold Increase
Broader Context: Reddit’s Strategic Data Protection Campaign
Industry Implications: Setting Precedent for AI Data Rights
Legal Framework: Testing the Limits of Digital Millennium Copyright Act
The Future of AI Development Hangs in the Balance

The lawsuit alleges that Perplexity, when blocked from directly accessing Reddit’s platform, turned to what the complaint describes as “would-be bank robbers” – data-scraping service providers SerpApi, Oxylabs, and AWMProxy – to circumvent technological barriers. This case emerges as AI companies increasingly rely on high-quality human-generated content to train their models, creating tension between innovation and intellectual property rights.

The “Bank Robber” Analogy: A Deliberate Circumvention Strategy

Reddit’s legal filing employs striking imagery to illustrate its allegations. The platform describes its own systems as the “vault” protected by technological barriers, while comparing Google Search to an “armored truck carrying the cash.” According to the complaint, the defendants specialized in masking their identities and locations to bypass Google’s controls, scraping billions of search results pages containing Reddit content.

“In a very real sense, these Defendants are similar to would-be bank robbers, who, knowing they cannot get into the bank vault, break into the armored truck carrying the cash instead,” the lawsuit states. The complaint further characterizes Perplexity as “more akin to a North Korean hacker” – a willing beneficiary of this alleged data extraction operation.

Industrial-Scale Data Scraping Operations Revealed

The scale of the alleged data extraction is staggering. During a mere two-week period in July 2025, the defendants are accused of accessing nearly three billion pages containing Reddit content through Google Search results. This volume suggests a systematic, industrial approach to data collection that raises fundamental questions about fair use and commercial exploitation.

Reddit’s complaint emphasizes that Perplexity, as an advertised client of SerpApi, demonstrated clear knowledge of how its data was being obtained. “These AI companies, worth up to tens of billions of dollars, desperately need access to more and more high quality, current data to support their ambitions, and Reddit is a top-cited source of data for them,” the document states.

The Evidence Trail: From Cease-and-Desist to Forty-Fold Increase

Reddit’s case appears strengthened by what it describes as Perplexity’s contradictory actions. After receiving a cease-and-desist letter in May 2024, Perplexity allegedly claimed it did not use Reddit content to train its models and would respect the site’s robots.txt protocol. However, instead of decreasing, Reddit citations on Perplexity reportedly increased forty-fold following this exchange., according to market developments

Perhaps most damning is Reddit’s claim that it created a specific post configured to be accessible only to Google’s crawler. The company states that “within hours,” Perplexity allegedly “produced the contents” of that exclusive post, providing what Reddit considers smoking-gun evidence of the data pipeline.

Broader Context: Reddit’s Strategic Data Protection Campaign

This lawsuit against Perplexity represents the second major legal action in Reddit’s campaign to defend its data assets. The company filed a similar suit against AI giant Anthropic in June 2025, alleging unauthorized training on Reddit data and continued server access over 100,000 times after promising to stop.

Reddit’s controversial 2023 API changes, which sparked widespread user protests, now appear as part of a broader strategy to commercialize access to its unique corpus of human conversations. The platform has already secured licensing deals with major players like Google and OpenAI, establishing a precedent that its data has significant commercial value.

Industry Implications: Setting Precedent for AI Data Rights

The outcome of this case could reshape how AI companies access and use publicly available human-generated content. A ruling in Reddit’s favor would solidify platform data as protected commercial assets, potentially creating a new licensing economy for AI training data. Conversely, a victory for Perplexity could legitimize current scraping practices and undermine the emerging data-licensing model., as previous analysis

Reddit Chief Legal Officer Ben Lee framed the issue starkly: “AI companies are locked in an arms race for quality human content – and that pressure has fueled an industrial-scale ‘data-laundering’ economy.” Meanwhile, Perplexity’s Jesse Dwyer has stated the company “will always fight vigorously for users’ rights to freely and fairly access public knowledge,” setting the stage for a fundamental clash of perspectives.

Legal Framework: Testing the Limits of Digital Millennium Copyright Act

This case poses a direct test of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as a tool to protect not just discrete copyrighted works, but entire databases of public-yet-commercially-valuable human expression. The lawsuit will likely explore whether platforms can claim proprietary rights over user-generated content when organized and presented as a comprehensive dataset.

The legal battle also raises questions about intermediary liability and whether companies can be held responsible for data obtained through third-party services specifically designed to circumvent access controls.

The Future of AI Development Hangs in the Balance

As artificial intelligence systems become increasingly sophisticated, their hunger for high-quality training data grows correspondingly. Reddit’s vast repository of human conversations, opinions, and expertise represents precisely the type of content that advanced AI models require. This lawsuit ultimately tests whether platforms that host user-generated content can monetize that data through licensing agreements or whether AI companies can freely access public discussions for commercial purposes.

The resolution of this case will likely influence how other platforms approach data protection and commercialization, potentially creating a new paradigm for the AI data economy. With billions in market value at stake for both AI companies and content platforms, the outcome could determine which business model prevails in the age of artificial intelligence.