AI News Roundup – Reddit sues Perplexity AI for unauthorized web scraping, OpenAI releases AI-powered web browser, AI data center backlash grows, and more

To help you stay on top of the latest news, our AI practice group has compiled a roundup of the developments we are following.

• • The Associated Press reports on a new lawsuit brought by social media site Reddit against Perplexity, a major AI company, alleging illegal web scraping of Reddit posts for use in AI training. The lawsuit, brought in federal court in New York City, accuses Perplexity and a handful of other companies of unfair competition, unjust enrichment, and copyright infringement. Generative AI models are often trained on publicly available data from the internet, and Reddit in particular is the most-cited source for most LLMs, even above Wikipedia. Reddit has implemented anti-scraping measures to deter unauthorized use of its content, especially as it seeks to strike content licensing deals with major tech companies, which it has already made with major AI companies OpenAI and Google. The lawsuit alleges that some companies have circumvented these measures by masking identities and disguising the “bots” that perform the scraping, and that Perplexity was a willing customer to these companies. Reddit filed a similar lawsuit against Anthropic this past June (as reported by this AI Roundup), and a hearing in that case is scheduled for January 2026.
  • OpenAI unveiled this past week an AI-powered web browser, ChatGPT Atlas, according to The Verge. The browser’s main feature, an “agent mode,” allows ChatGPT to be a user’s companion as they browse the web, showing both the webpage and the transcript of the AI’s responses to what is on screen. The browser integrates several OpenAI agentic AI technologies, allowing ChatGPT to perform tasks on a user’s behalf, from booking flights, making dinner reservations, or doing online shopping, all personalized to a user’s past inputs and preferences using a memory feature. ChatGPT Atlas is currently available for macOS, with Windows, iOS, and Android versions “coming soon.”
  • The New York Times reports on growing backlash around the world to the construction of AI data centers. The market for such facilities, which contain powerful computing systems used to run and train AI chatbots, has exploded in recent years along with the ongoing AI boom. This has also continued outside the U.S. — a majority of the largest data centers in the world are outside of the U.S., where data centers are coming under increasing levels of criticism. AI data centers consume vast quantities of electricity to power servers and water to cool those systems. In Ireland, over one-fifth of the country’s electricity is consumed by data centers, and similar concerns have arisen in many other countries. In Ireland, activists have opposed the construction of new data centers on farmland, citing environmental degradation and electricity supply concerns. Despite concerns, tech companies and government officials seeking to boost economic growth have continued the rapid construction of AI data centers, which is likely to continue as long as the AI boom continues.
  • AI maker Anthropic has struck a multibillion-dollar deal with Google Cloud for the former to use the latter’s AI chips, according to the Financial Times. In particular, Anthropic will have access to Google’s custom AI chips (dubbed “Tensor Processing Units,” or TPUs) for use in training and development of Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot. Anthropic’s CFO said that the “expanded capacity ensures we can meet our exponentially growing demand while keeping our models at the cutting edge of the industry.” Anthropic told the FT that the deal was worth tens of billions of dollars, and the new chips will come online for the company in 2026. It follows other deals struck by Anthropic rival OpenAI to gain access to AI chips and computing power from Nvidia, AMD, and others, as a demonstration of the race to build up computing resources as companies seek to build ever more advanced AI models.
  • Bloomberg reports that OpenAI is training its AI models to aid work in the finance industry. A group of former investment bankers at major U.S. banks such as JPMorganChase and Goldman Sachs have been working at OpenAI to write prompts and develop financial models with the goal of allowing AI to perform entry-level tasks at investment banks. Junior-level investment bankers often work over 80 hours per week when working on deals, often poring over Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations, and thus many AI startups are jumping at the opportunity to address this type of work. The group at OpenAI is instructed to write prompts that relate to their financial model in order to test its function, and it undergoes human review before that information can be used in training AI systems. The project, codenamed Mercury, has been kept under wraps within the AI giant, but reflects the company’s drive to expand AI usage across a wide range of industries.