On October 22, 2025, Reddit, the sprawling online forum known for its candid conversations on everything from Swiss dog breeds to the finer points of video game lore, took a decisive step in a growing battle over who owns the internet’s most valuable resource: human-generated data. In a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Reddit accused Perplexity AI—a rising star in the artificial intelligence sector—and three other companies of orchestrating what it described as “industrial-scale, unlawful” data scraping, using Google as a back door to harvest millions of Reddit comments for commercial gain.
The complaint, which names San Francisco-based Perplexity AI, Lithuanian data-scraping company Oxylabs UAB, Texas startup SerpApi, and AWMProxy (described in the suit as a “former Russian botnet”), alleges that these companies bypassed Reddit’s digital protections by scraping content directly from Google’s search results. According to Reddit, these actions not only violated U.S. copyright laws but also amounted to unfair competition and unjust enrichment. The lawsuit seeks a permanent injunction, financial damages, and a prohibition on further use or sale of any previously scraped Reddit data.
“Scrapers bypass technological protections to steal data, then sell it to clients hungry for training material. Reddit is a prime target because it’s one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created,” said Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, in a statement quoted by multiple outlets including the Associated Press and Business Insider. The company’s frustration is palpable—and not without precedent. This is Reddit’s second major legal action in as many years, having previously sued AI company Anthropic in June 2025 for similar alleged infractions.
The heart of the dispute is the rapidly escalating value of original, high-quality data in the age of artificial intelligence. As AI companies race to build ever more sophisticated chatbots and language models, the need for vast troves of authentic human discourse has never been greater. Reddit, with more than 100 million daily users and over 416 million weekly visitors, is a goldmine of such content. Its posts and comment threads, brimming with advice, debate, and humor, are seen as ideal raw material for training AI to mimic human language and reasoning.
But Reddit says it’s not willing to give that gold away for free. In recent years, the company has spent tens of millions of dollars developing anti-scraping technologies and has moved to monetize its data by striking licensing deals with tech giants like Google and OpenAI. In March 2024, Google announced an expanded partnership with Reddit, giving its Gemini chatbot access to Reddit’s content, while Reddit gained access to Google’s Vertex AI platform. Just a month later, Reddit went public with a $6.4 billion valuation—an IPO buoyed in part by the newfound value of its data assets.
Despite these high-profile deals, not every AI firm has followed the rules, Reddit alleges. According to the lawsuit, Perplexity and its co-defendants found a workaround: rather than scrape Reddit directly—which would trigger anti-bot defenses—they harvested Reddit content as it appeared in Google search results. The suit claims that SerpApi, Oxylabs, and AWMProxy collectively scraped billions of Google queries a month, packaging and reselling the resulting Reddit data to clients, including Perplexity.
Reddit’s legal team likened the operation to a heist, stating, “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.” In a particularly telling episode, Reddit claims it set a digital “marked bill” trap: a test post visible only to Google’s search engine. Within hours, content from that post appeared in Perplexity’s “answer engine,” suggesting, according to Reddit, that Perplexity or its partners had scraped the data illicitly.
The companies named in the suit have pushed back strongly. Perplexity’s spokesperson Jesse Dwyer told Business Insider that the company “will always fight vigorously for users’ rights to freely and fairly access public knowledge. Our approach remains principled and responsible as we provide factual answers with accurate AI, and we will not tolerate threats against openness and the public interest.” SerpApi’s customer success director, Ryan Schafer, said via email, “We strongly disagree with Reddit’s allegations and intend to vigorously defend ourselves in court.” Oxylabs, for its part, said it was “shocked and disappointed” and would “not hesitate to defend itself against these allegations.” Denas Grybauskas, Oxylabs’ chief governance and strategy officer, added, “No company should claim ownership of public data that does not belong to them. It is possible that it is just an attempt to sell the same public data at an inflated price.” Attempts to reach AWMProxy for comment were unsuccessful.
This legal clash is emblematic of a broader shift in how the internet’s original content creators and aggregators view their role. For decades, web scraping was a fact of digital life, often viewed as symbiotic: Google’s bots crawled the web to index content, driving valuable traffic back to publishers like Reddit. Data scrapers, in turn, sometimes helped webmasters optimize their sites for better visibility. But as Doug Leeds of Really Simple Licensing told The New York Times, “It wasn’t necessarily a problem back then, because there was a monetization method for all the companies involved.”
The advent of generative AI has upended that balance. Now, publishers and platforms are locking down their content, demanding payment from AI companies eager to use it for training—and, in some cases, taking legal action. Book publishers, news organizations, and now Reddit are all seeking to protect their intellectual property and ensure that the value of their users’ contributions accrues to them, not to third parties.
Reddit’s suit also highlights the complexities of enforcing digital boundaries. While robots.txt files and other technical measures are supposed to signal to bots which parts of a site can be crawled, not all scrapers honor those signals. Google itself, though not a party to the lawsuit, acknowledged the challenge. “Google has always actively respected the choices websites make through robots.txt, but sadly there’s a bunch of stealthy scrapers that do not,” spokesperson José Castaneda told reporters.
For Reddit, the stakes are high—not just financially, but in terms of its competitive position. The company has made clear its ambitions to become a true search destination, leveraging its unique repository of human knowledge to attract users and advertisers alike. “Every week, hundreds of millions of people come to Reddit looking for advice, and we’re turning more of that intent into active users of Reddit’s native search,” the company noted in its Q2 2024 report.
As the case moves forward, with a hearing on the Anthropic suit already scheduled for January 2026, the outcome could set important precedents for how data is valued, protected, and shared in an AI-driven world. Whatever the verdict, one thing is certain: the fight over who owns the internet’s conversations is far from over.
