On October 22, 2025, Reddit, Inc. initiated a federal lawsuit against Perplexity AI, Inc. in the Southern District of New York, asserting violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) related to anti-circumvention measures. The lawsuit also includes claims for unjust enrichment and unfair competition. Reddit contends that Perplexity has engaged in systematic evasion of the technical controls designed to protect its content, framing the case as a significant challenge against what it describes as “industrial-scale” circumvention.
Reddit’s complaint outlines how Perplexity, along with associated data-scraping firms, allegedly utilized various methods, including masking identities and rotating IP addresses, to scrape billions of search-engine results pages (SERPs) from Google that contained Reddit content. This data, according to Reddit, was then incorporated into Perplexity’s “answer engine.”
Key Allegations in the Lawsuit
Two notable claims distinguish this case. First, Reddit asserts that it published a post accessible to Google’s search engine but not directly available on its platform. Within hours, Perplexity reportedly surfaced significant portions of this post, suggesting that it scraped Google’s results and ingested the data.
Second, following a cease-and-desist letter issued by Reddit in May 2024, the platform alleges that Perplexity’s citations to Reddit increased by a factor of forty. Despite public assertions from Perplexity that it respects robots.txt directives, Reddit’s complaint emphasizes that the company’s actions demonstrate a blatant disregard for its content protection measures.
Rather than contesting how Perplexity utilized the copyrighted materials, Reddit’s claims under §1201(a)(1) focus on the act of bypassing technological measures meant to control access to these works. The lawsuit also implicates data-scraping co-defendants, suggesting that Perplexity collaborated with them to facilitate widespread circumvention of access controls. Reddit is seeking both injunctive relief and damages to address the alleged harm to its business.
Impact on Licensing and User Privacy
Reddit positions this lawsuit as a defense of its licensing model, which it claims Perplexity is undermining. The company has established paid licensing agreements with organizations such as OpenAI and Google. Reddit contends that Perplexity’s practices not only devalue existing licensing arrangements but also divert user engagement away from its platform. This shift may reduce the necessity for users to access Reddit’s content directly, thereby impairing its commercial viability.
The complaint highlights concerns about user privacy as well. By bypassing technical controls, the scraping process allegedly captured deleted or restricted posts, which could hinder Reddit’s ability to honor user deletion requests and privacy preferences. According to Reddit, this jeopardizes users’ trust and engagement on the platform.
The outcome of this legal battle may hinge on several critical factors. These include whether Google’s and Reddit’s measures qualify as §1201 “technological measures” that effectively control access, whether scraping SERPs constitutes access to the underlying copyrighted works, and the knowledge and intent of Perplexity and the intermediary data-scraping firms involved.
As this case unfolds, it underscores a broader trend of content platforms turning to access-control and contract-based strategies when direct copyright claims may be uncertain or unavailable. For content owners, it highlights the importance of combining technical barriers—such as API gating and rate-limiting—with contractual enforcement to deter circumvention. For AI developers, the case serves as a reminder that publicly available content is not necessarily free for training, especially when obtained through methods that bypass access restrictions.
