Reddit seeks to block former law firm Proskauer from defending Perplexity in scraping suit

What happened

Reddit asked Judge Paul A. Engelmayer of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York to disqualify Proskauer Rose from taking over Perplexity AI's defense in Reddit's October 2025 copyright lawsuit, which alleges industrial-scale bypassing of technical protections to obtain Reddit content for Perplexity's AI answer engine. Reddit says Proskauer represented it in a whistleblower case involving its Google and OpenAI licensing deals and gave assurances it would stay out of the Perplexity matter. Proskauer disputes that a binding restriction exists and says the earlier work was an unrelated employment dispute. No ruling has issued yet, and Perplexity's current counsel has sought to withdraw pending the decision.

Why it may matter to you

The motion is the newest procedural development in a closely watched anti-scraping case testing how AI companies can harvest platform content for training and retrieval. Its outcome could affect Perplexity's defense team and the case's timing.

What is not yet known

How the judge will rule on the disqualification request and the withdrawal motion. The facts above are as reported by Law Commentary from the October 9, 2026 filings; the filings were not independently reviewed.