Reddit Files Lawsuit Against Anthropic

Reddit filed a lawsuit against AI company Anthropic. The social media site claims that Anthropic scraped its user data without permission after it previously agreed to stop the practice.

The lawsuit accuses Anthropic of accessing the company’s servers over 100,000 times to train its Claude chatbot without consent. “Unlike its competitors, Anthropic has refused to agree to respect Reddit users’ basic privacy rights, including removing deleted posts from its systems. Anthropic is, in fact, trained on the most robust online discussion platform in the world, Reddit.com,” Reddit stated in the filing.

“For its part, despite what its marketing material says, Anthropic does not care about Reddit’s rules or users: it believes it is entitled to take whatever content it wants and use that content however it desires, with impunity,” according to the filing.

“Other giants in the AI space understand and respect Reddit’s rules,” Reddit stated. “That is why companies like OpenAI and Google have entered into formal partnerships with Reddit whereby they are permitted to use public Reddit content but only after agreeing to Reddit’s licensing terms that protect Reddit and its users’ interests and privacy.”

Reddit stated it filed the lawsuit to compel Anthropic to abide by its contractual and legal obligations. It also seeks compensatory damages, as well as restitution for the amount by which Anthropic has benefitted from scraping its content. Last year a group of authors and journalists led a class-action lawsuit against Anthropic for allegedly using hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books to train its Claude.