Social media platform Reddit sued artificial intelligence startup Perplexity in New York federal court today, accusing it and three other companies of unlawfully scraping its data to train Perplexity’s AI-based search engine.

Reddit said in the complaint that the data-scraping companies circumvented its data protection measures in order to steal data that Perplexity “desperately needs” to power its “answer engine” system. The case is one of many filed by content owners against tech companies over the alleged misuse of their copyrighted material to train AI systems. Reddit filed a similar lawsuit against AI startup Anthropic in June that is still ongoing.

“Our approach remains principled and responsible as we provide factual answers with accurate AI, and we will not tolerate threats again

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