Reddit Takes Legal Action Against Anthropic Over AI Data Scraping

Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, accusing the company of constructing its Claude AI models by harvesting data from Reddit users without permission or compensation. Under Reddit’s user agreement, anyone accessing the site, including web-crawling bots, is prohibited from using its content for commercial purposes without an official agreement.

Reddit claims that Anthropic’s bots have been actively scraping vast amounts of conversations and posts over the years to train and enhance the Claude AI. The lawsuit casts doubt on Anthropic’s commitment to ethical practices in AI, despite the company’s image as a responsible player—often viewed as the “white knight” within the industry. According to Reddit, this portrayal is mere “empty marketing gimmicks.”

Notably, Reddit highlights an instance from July 2024 when Anthropic claimed it had ceased its bot activities on Reddit. The lawsuit alleges that logs indicated Anthropic’s bots attempted to access the site over a hundred thousand times in the months that followed, contradicting their statement.

This lawsuit also touches on user privacy concerns. When users delete their posts or comments on Reddit, they expect that information to be completely removed. Reddit has existing licensing agreements with major AI firms such as Google and OpenAI, which include measures ensuring that deleted content is also removed from AI training datasets. However, Reddit asserts that Anthropic does not have such an agreement, allowing content from deleted posts to remain part of Claude’s knowledge base—disregarding users’ rights to delete their contributions.

Reddit’s lawsuit even references a screenshot where Claude acknowledges it has no mechanism to verify if data it utilized was subsequently deleted by users. In terms of remedies sought, Reddit is not only looking for financial compensation to cover increased server costs and lost licensing revenues, but also seeks an injunction that would prevent Anthropic from using any Reddit data immediately.

Furthermore, Reddit wishes to bar Anthropic from selling or licensing any products derived from that data, potentially leading to the removal of Claude from the market itself. This case raises a significant legal question: does publicly available content on the internet mean it’s free for any corporation to use for profit? Reddit is taking a firm stand against this notion, and the case’s outcome could reshape future AI development practices.

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