Perplexity AI fails to dismiss Reddit lawsuit over data scraping

A federal judge kept Reddit’s lawsuit against Perplexity AI alive on July 31, rejecting the startup’s bid to throw out claims over alleged scraping of Reddit comments and other content. The case, filed in the Southern District of New York under docket No. 1:25-cv-08736, now moves past the dismissal stage in a fight over whether AI firms can harvest platform material without permission.

Reddit’s complaint names Perplexity AI, SerpApi LLC, Oxylabs UAB and AWMProxy, and says the companies scraped user comments and other Reddit posts for AI training and commercial use. The filing also points to technical barriers that Reddit says were bypassed, including SearchGuard and CAPTCHAs, putting the dispute squarely on the line between ordinary web access and large-scale data collection built for machine use.

Perplexity tried to break the case apart by arguing that the claims were not aimed at it and by challenging them under anti-hacking law and contract theories. The judge rejected that dismissal bid, keeping the company in a case that could test how far websites can go in restricting scraping and how aggressively AI companies can rely on public-facing content to feed search and generative systems.

The named defendants also show Reddit is not only targeting an AI consumer app, but the scraping infrastructure that can sit behind it. That focus on upstream vendors matters because proxy networks and data-access services help determine who pays for web data, who controls access, and who captures the value when user-generated posts become training material. Reddit has made its corpus more difficult to harvest as AI companies compete for high-quality human conversation, troubleshooting threads and niche expertise that can improve responses.

For Perplexity, the loss is another legal overhang as it tries to defend a search-style product that summarizes web information and cites sources. The case could affect licensing talks, publisher leverage and the economics of training data well beyond Reddit, especially if judges continue to treat scraped platform content as something that may require permission rather than a freely available resource.