Reddit Inc. has filed a lawsuit against AI startup Perplexity AI and three data-scraping service providers, accusing them of copyright infringement. The lawsuit, filed in a New York federal court, alleges that these companies illegally scraped vast amounts of user-generated content from Reddit's platform to train their artificial intelligence models. The other companies named in the suit are Oxylabs, AWMProxy, and SerpApi. Reddit claims the defendants bypassed its protective measures to access and misuse its data, which it considers a valuable asset. The company is seeking monetary damages and a court order to prevent the named firms from using its data. This legal action underscores Reddit's strategy of monetizing its data through licensing agreements, such as those already established with Google and OpenAI, and protecting its intellectual property from unauthorized use in the burgeoning AI industry.