(Reuters) -Social media platform Reddit sued artificial intelligence startup Perplexity in New York federal court on Wednesday, 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 against openness and the public interest,” Perplexity said in a statement.
“AI companies are locked in an arms race for quality human content—and that pressure has fueled an industrial-scale ‘data laundering’ economy,” Reddit chief legal officer Ben Lee said in a statement.
(Reporting by Blake Brittain in WashingtonEditing by Nick Zieminski)
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