Reddit lawsuit against SerpApi and Perplexity AI survives dismissal

A U.S. federal judge in the Southern District of New York denied SerpApi’s motion to dismiss Reddit’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) lawsuit, allowing the platform’s core claims to proceed. Reddit alleges that SerpApi supplied a tool that bypassed Google’s access controls and that Perplexity AI paid for the service, enabling the large‑scale harvesting of billions of Reddit posts and comments for AI training without a licensing agreement.

The complaint also names Oxylabs UAB and AWMProxy as additional defendants. Reddit seeks damages for lost licensing revenue and the cost of new security measures, as well as injunctive relief. The ruling follows a separate DMCA case in which Google’s own suit against SerpApi was dismissed for lack of standing. SerpApi argues that publicly available search results are not protected by copyright, while Reddit maintains that the scraped content is its protected material. The outcome could affect Reddit’s emerging data‑licensing business and broader AI‑training practices.