Reddit is suing artificial intelligence company Anthropic for allegedly illegally “scraping” comments to train its chatbot Claude.
Reddit claims that Anthropic programmed other bots to steal user data for Claude, which then “intentionally trained on the personal data of Reddit users without ever requesting their consent.” Reddit said this occurred without any sort of licensing agreement between the two companies.
“AI companies should not be allowed to scrape information and content from people without clear limitations on how they can use that data,” Ben Lee” Reddit’s chief legal officer, said in a statement Wednesday.
Reddit has licensing agreements with other AI companies, including Google and OpenAI, to give them access to comments to train their systems under certain conditions. In exchange, Reddit posts show up in their chatbots’ answers.
Claude allegedly frequently references Reddit content.
The company is seeking damages and restitution as well as an injunction to stop Anthropic from using material from Reddit and its communities.
“We will not tolerate profit-seeking entities like Anthropic commercially exploiting Reddit content for billions of dollars without any return for redditors or respect for their privacy,” Lee said.
Anthropic has previously been sued for stealing copyrighted books and copyrighted song lyrics in separate cases.
OpenAi and Microsoft are currently being sued by a number of newspaper publishers for training with news articles without permission.
