Perplexity caught red-handed scraping data, Reddit claims
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Reddit has sued Perplexity AI for continuing to use Reddit’s content to train its AI model after prior warnings not to scrape the platform’s content. As AI systems increasingly rely on publicly available online content to train and generate answers, companies like Reddit are trying to draw firm lines over what is considered “public” and “proprietary” data. Reddit’s trap exposes alleged data theft Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity, a $20 billion AI company, accusing it of illegally collecting data through its platform. According to court documents filed Wednesday in a Manhattan federal court, Reddit said Perplexity ignored instructions not to scrape its content and continued to use Reddit data to generate AI answers. The complaint says Reddit had explicitly blocked Perplexity from collecting its data, but the AI company’s “answer engine” still produced results containing Reddit content. “The increase was so dramatic that an outside observer hypothesized that the increase was due to Perplexity entering a licensing deal with Reddit,” the lawsuit said. “In truth, there is no license between Perplexity and Reddit.” To prove its suspicion, Reddit designed a clever digital test. It created a “trap” post that could only be found by Google’s search engine. Google has a legitimate content-licensing deal with Reddit, and so any company without such a deal should have been unable to access the post. The company described it as the online equivalent of a “marked bill.” If Perplexity’s system reproduced the contents of that hidden post, Reddit would know it had gone around its safeguards possibly by pulling data through Google’s search results, known as SERPs. Within hours, the supposedly private test post began showing up in responses generated by Perplexity’s AI tool. “The only way that Perplexity could have obtained that Reddit content and then used it in its ‘answer…
Filed under: News - @ October 26, 2025 12:21 am