![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/perplexity-caught-breaking-rules.jpg\")
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\t\t\tIllustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins \/ Futurism. Source: Getty Images<\/p>\n
Over two decades ago, the New Oxford American Dictionary wanted to see if any of its competitors were cribbing its definitions. So it set up a trap. In its first edition, published in 2001, NOAD included a word called \u201cesquivalience,\u201d which it defined as the \u201cwillful avoidance of one\u2019s official responsibilities.\u201d<\/p>\n
The word was a fake. And the bait worked<\/a>: the word reference website Dictionary.com was caught using \u201cesquivalience,\u201d attributing it to Merriam Webster\u2019s New Millennium. Its guilt was undeniable, and the debacle gained considerable media coverage.<\/p>\n These copyright traps have a name: \u201cmountweazels\u201d \u2014 a term with its own curious history<\/a> \u2014 and an evolution of them is now being used by companies fending off AI data scrapers that devour vast swathes of the internet without asking permission.<\/p>\n In a lawsuit against four tech companies filed Wednesday and covered by The New York Times<\/a>, Reddit revealed how it managed to ensnare the AI startup Perplexity with its own sort of mountweazel. The forum-based social media platform put up a \u201ctest post\u201d on its site that could \u201conly be crawled by Google\u2019s search engine and was not otherwise accessible anywhere on the internet,\u201d it said.\u00a0<\/p>\n But within hours, Perplexity\u2019s AI-powered search engine showed the content from the trap Reddit post.<\/p>\n \u201cPerplexity\u2019s business model is effectively to take Reddit\u2019s content from Google search results,\u201d then feed it into an AI model and \u201ccall it a new product,\u201d Reddit lawyers argued in the suit, per the NYT.<\/p>\n It\u2019s the latest lawsuit to put the AI industry\u2019s voracious use of scraped data under the spotlight. Training the powerful large language models that power AI products like ChatGPT would not have been possible without having free access to an unbelievable wealth of data, much of it copyrighted. Reddit itself is trying to cash in on the AI data demand by locking out scrapers and selling its user data at a premium<\/a>. It expects to make over $200 million over the next few years through the data licensing venture<\/a>.<\/p>\n In addition to Perplexity, the Reddit suit targets three more data scraping firms: SerpApi based in Texas; Oxylabs, a Lithuanian startup; and AWMProxy in Russia, which has been linked<\/a> to a notorious malware botnet called Glupteba.<\/p>\n Years before the AI boom, these companies scraped mountains of Google search data to provide search engine optimization services to businesses. Google\u2019s search results were themselves created by scraping websites and then organizing that data. For the most part, this created a mutually beneficial relationship, since scraping helped direct traffic to the websites the data came from through search results, the NYT explains.<\/p>\n But then these SEO firms started selling their troves of scraped Google data directly to AI companies. The AI chatbots that were trained on these data sets don\u2019t direct a meaningful amount of traffic to the websites they get their data from \u2014 if they give accurate attributions at all \u2014and suddenly, the relationship became one-sided.<\/p>\n