The social media platform Reddit has sued the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, alleging that it is illegally “scraping” the comments of Reddit users to train its chatbot Claude.
Reddit claims that Anthropic has used automated bots to access the social network’s content despite being asked not to do so, and “intentionally trained on the personal data of Reddit users without ever requesting their consent”.
“AI companies should not be allowed to scrape information and content from people without clear limitations on how they can use that data,” said Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, in a statement on Wednesday.
Reddit has previously entered licensing agreements with Google, OpenAI and other companies to enable them to train their AI systems on Reddit commentary.
Those agreements “enable us to enforce meaningful protections for our users, including the right to delete your content, user privacy protections, and preventing users from being spammed using this content”, Lee said.
Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company, has been sued by Reddit, a social media platform, on the grounds that it is unlawfully “scraping” Reddit user comments in order to train its chatbot Claude.
Despite being asked not to, Reddit alleges that Anthropic has “intentionally trained on the personal data of Reddit users without ever requesting their consent” and has utilized automated bots to access the social network’s content.
An inquiry for comment was not immediately answered by Anthropic. The claim was submitted to the California superior court in San Francisco on Wednesday.
“AI companies should not be permitted to scrape people’s content and information without explicit restrictions on how they can use that information,” Reddit’s chief legal officer Ben Lee said in a statement on Wednesday.
In order to allow Google, OpenAI, and other businesses to train their AI systems on Reddit commentary, Reddit has previously entered into licensing agreements with them. The development of numerous large language models—the kind of AI that powers ChatGPT, Claude, and other apps—has been aided by the vast amount of text produced by Reddit’s 100 million daily active users.
According to Lee, those agreements “allow us to enforce meaningful protections for our users, including the right to delete your content, user privacy protections, and preventing users from being spammed using this content.”.
