Reddit files lawsuit against Anthropic, claiming unauthorized use of its content to train AI models

Reddit has taken legal action against AI startup Anthropic, claiming it used its platform’s data to train AI models, specifically the Claude chatbot. 

The lawsuit, which was filed this month on Wednesday, in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco, alleges that Anthropic breached Reddit’s user agreement and engaged in “unlawful and unfair business acts” by scraping data without a licensing agreement.

The court documents began with Reddit calling Anthropic a “late-blooming” AI company that “bills itself as the white knight of the AI industry” and stating that “It is anything but.”

Reddiot accuses Anthropic of data scraping

According to Reddit, Anthropic has accessed its content over 100,000 times since July 2024, even after claiming to have stopped crawling in May 2024. 

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

Reddit says it has established rules dictating how its data can be used, and it said they are clearly memorialized in the user agreement.

“While Reddit has always been of the mind that the community should be open to all humans looking for connection and community, it has never allowed its platform and the countless communities who find a home on it to be appropriated by commercial actors seeking to create billion-dollar enterprises and offering nothing in return to Reddit and its users,” the complaint says.

The company is seeking damages, restitution, and an injunction to prevent further unauthorized use. 

However, Anthropic has contested the claims and, in an emailed statement, has stated it will defend itself “vigorously.”

OpenAI partnership sets precedent for Reddit’s expectations of AI companies

Reddit has been at the forefront of data usage rights since the generative AI boom started with the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022. Its site is ripe with user-generated information about hundreds of thousands of topics and has been a main source of training for large AI models, including Anthropic’s Claude.

However, Reddit has a partnership with OpenAI, which was announced in May, that allows the company to train its AI models on Reddit content. The company has a similar agreement with Google, but it does not have any such arrangement with Anthropic. 

In the recently filed lawsuit, Reddit highlighted how “other giants in the AI space understand and respect Reddit’s rules,” naming OpenAI and Google as companies that “are permitted to use public Reddit content but only after agreeing to “licensing terms” protecting user privacy.

Reddit’s lawsuit against Anthropic emphasizes that Anthropic bypassed such agreements, scraping data without permission, which reportedly undermines its business model and user trust. 

Reddit’s experience with OpenAI may have heightened its sensitivity to data misuse, which is now prompting the legal action to protect its market for data licensing.  Its agreement with OpenAI is characterized by a formal licensing deal with clear terms, which seems to have now set the precedent for Reddit’s involvement with AI companies. 

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