Reddit has sued Anthropic for allegedly training its chatbot Claude through illegally scraping comments from the social media site.
In the filing, Reddit claimed that Anthropic used automated bots to access their content more than 1000 times despite being told not to do so.
“Anthropic is in fact intentionally trained on the personal data of Reddit users without ever requesting their consent,” the filing said.
“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.”
The claim was filed in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco.
“AI companies should not be allowed to scrape information and content from people without clear limitations on how they can use that data,” Reddit’s chief legal officer Ben Lee said in a statement.
In a statement emailed to CNBC, an Anthropic spokesperson said, “we disagree with Reddit’s claims and will defend ourselves vigorously.”
In the lawsuit, Reddit names OpenAI and Google as AI companies that “understand and respect Reddit’s rules” and are “permitted to use public Reddit content but only after agreeing to Reddit’s licensing terms”.
In May, Reddit announced a partnership with OpenAI, allowing the tech giant to train its chatbot, ChatGPT and other AI models to train on Reddit content. The social media platform has also entered into a similar deal with Google.
This isn’t the first time Anthropic has found itself in hot water, as three authors filed a class-action lawsuit in California federal court against Anthropic in August last year, and Universal Music sued the company in a Tennessee federal court in October 2023.
