Social media giant Reddit has launched a lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Perplexity, alleging that it illegally scraped user posts to train its AI model, marking the latest data-rights clash between content owners and the AI industry.
The complaint filed in New York federal court on Wednesday also named three defendants, which Reddit says helped Perplexity collect its data: Lithuanian data scraper Oxylabs, "former Russian botnet" AWMProxy, and Texas startup SerpApi.
Reddit alleged that the three smaller entities were able to extract its copyrighted content "by masking their identities, hiding their locations and disguising their web scrapers as regular people."
Perplexity, which runs an AI-powered search engine, denied the allegations and accused Reddit of "extortion" and opposition to an open internet, while SerpApi told CNBC it "strongly disagrees" with Reddit's claims and intends to defend itself in court.
The case represents one of many filed by content owners accusing AI firms of using copyrighted material without permission to train their large language models. Reddit, in particular, has been on the front lines of that battle, having launched a similar ongoing lawsuit against AI startup Anthropic in June. CNBC was unable to reach Oxylabs and AWMProxy.
In a statement shared with CNBC, Ben Lee, Chief Legal Officer at Reddit, said that AI companies are" locked in an arms race for quality human content" and that pressure has fueled an "industrial-scale 'data laundering' economy."