Reddit is suing Anthropic for allegedly utilizing the location’s information to coach AI fashions with out a correct licensing settlement, in keeping with a criticism filed in a Northern California court docket on Wednesday. Reddit claims within the criticism that Anthropic’s unauthorized use of the location’s information for business functions was illegal, and alleges the AI startup violated Reddit’s person settlement.
Reddit’s lawsuit makes it the primary Massive Tech firm to legally problem an AI mannequin supplier over its coaching information practices, becoming a member of a litany of publishers which have sued tech firms on related grounds.
The New York Instances has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for coaching on its information articles with out fee or permission. In the meantime, Sarah Silverman and different guide authors have sued Meta for coaching AI fashions on their books with out approval. Music publishers and artists have additionally introduced related claims in opposition to AI audio, video, and picture technology startups, alleging misuse of their content material.
“We is not going to tolerate profit-seeking entities like Anthropic commercially exploiting Reddit content material for billions of {dollars} with none return for redditors or respect for his or her privateness,” mentioned Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief authorized officer, in a press release to TechCrunch.
Notably, Reddit has inked offers with different AI mannequin suppliers, together with OpenAI and Google, that permit these firms to coach AI fashions on Reddit’s information and have the location’s posts seem of their respective AI chatbots’ solutions. Nonetheless, within the submitting, Reddit says it topics OpenAI and Google to sure phrases that defend its customers’ pursuits and privateness.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has an 8.7% stake in Reddit, making him the third-largest shareholder, and was as soon as a member of the corporate’s board of administrators.
Within the submitting, Reddit claims that it approached Anthropic and made it clear that the AI startup didn’t have authorization to scrape or use Reddit’s content material. Nonetheless, Reddit alleges that Anthropic “refused to have interaction.”
“We disagree with Reddit’s claims and can defend ourselves vigorously,” mentioned Anthropic spokesperson Danielle Ghighlieri in an emailed assertion to TechCrunch.
Reddit claims in its criticism that Anthropic’s scraper bots ignored the social community’s robots.txt information, a normal that alerts to automated methods to not crawl web sites. The web group platform alleges that, after Anthropic claimed to dam its bots from scraping Reddit in 2024, Anthropic’s bots continued to scrape the platform greater than 100,000 instances.
Reddit is asking Anthropic to pay compensatory damages, in addition to restitution for the quantity by which Anthropic has been enriched by scraping Reddit’s content material. Reddit additionally requests an injunction prohibiting Anthropic from persevering with to make use of Reddit’s content material.
