Reddit Sues a Collection of Startups It Says Are Wrongly Scraping It for AI Training Data

Let’s say a website makes it a violation of its terms of service for you to send bots onto its pages in order to vacuum up its text, which you want to package as AI training data and sell. Next, suppose you think of a workaround: you don’t send your data scraping bots to that website, but to Google results pages that also have the text you’re looking for. Are you a business genius, or a thief?

If Reddit doesn’t succeed with its latest long shot legal effort against data scrapers, and you’re one of the companies doing this, you might just be a business genius, legally speaking anyway.

Reddit’s new suit, filed Wednesday in New York, is the latest round of legal Wac-a-Mole being played between established online platforms and the increasingly intricate data-sucking firms that want their precious data. Earlier this month LinkedIn filed suit against a firm called ProAPIs for using robotic accounts to ingest users’ personal data—which as we all know, LinkedIn keeps tucked away behind its irksome login wall.

Reddit also sued Anthropic for something similar, saying the AI company claimed it had stopped visiting Reddit to scrape data, and then visited 100,000 more times.

The new suit—seeking damages, as well as the protection of a permanent injunction—names four defendants. The most famous one is Perplexity AI, which markets an AI-based search engine, and is already famous for its brazenness around data scraping. The other three, Texas-based SerpApi, Lithuania’s Oxylabs and AWMProxy, based in Russia, carried out versions of the more subtle plan outlined above, the suit claims. They then sold data to such tech giants as OpenAI and Meta.

An Oxylabs representative, Denas Grybauskas, explained what may be the company’s legal rationale to the New York Times, saying “no company should claim ownership of public data that does not belong to them.â€

There are challenges in the way of legal victory for Reddit. For one thing, it filed this suit in New York, and the companies it’s suing are mostly in other countries.

But second of all, these suits don’t necessarily work out for platforms. Elon Musk’s X had a similar suit dismissed last year, with the judge noting that the amount of control X was seeking over data “risks the possible creation of information monopolies that would disserve the public interest.â€