Reddit Inc. has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI and three data-scraping firms, accusing them of unlawfully collecting and using its data.

Filed Wednesday in a United States federal court, the suit alleges that Oxylabs UAB, AWMProxy, and SerpApi scraped Reddit content through Google search results for resale, and that Perplexity AI purchased the data from at least one of these companies.

Reddit claims the companies bypassed its technical safeguards by scraping Reddit content through Google search results rather than accessing the site directly. According to the lawsuit, the three data-scraping defendants accessed nearly three billion search result pages containing Reddit content over a two-week span in July 2025.

The social media company also alleges it caught Perplexity “red-handed” using Reddit data obtained through this method, even after receiving a cease-and-desist letter.

The complaint notes that Perplexity’s citations to Reddit rose fortyfold following the warning.

Reddit argues that while major AI firms such as OpenAI and Google have entered into formal agreements to access its data responsibly and protect user rights, the defendants opted to ignore such arrangements.

The complaint accuses them of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by bypassing Reddit’s technological safeguards designed to control access to its content. Reddit is seeking to halt what it calls the defendants’ “circumvention of security measures” and “blatant misuse of Reddit content.”