Reddit sues AI company Perplexity and others for ‘industrial-scale’ scraping of user comments

Social media platform Reddit sued the artificial intelligence company Perplexity AI and three other entities on Wednesday, alleging their involvement in an “industrial-scale, unlawful” economy to “scrape” the comments of millions of Reddit users for commercial gain.

Reddit’s lawsuit in a New York federal court takes aim at San Francisco-based Perplexity, maker of an AI chatbot and “answer engine” that competes with Google, ChatGPT and others in online search.

Also named in the lawsuit are Lithuanian data-scraping company Oxylabs UAB, a web…