On Wednesday, Reddit filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in a San Francisco superior court, asserting that the AI company has accessed its platform over 100,000 times since July 2024, despite previous claims from Anthropic that it had prohibited its bots from doing so.
In the court filing, Reddit characterizes Anthropic as a “late-blooming artificial intelligence (‘AI’) company that bills itself as the white knight of the AI industry,” claiming that its public persona is misleading.
Reddit argues that the case highlights the dual nature of Anthropic, describing it as presenting a public image that claims to respect laws and boundaries while privately disregarding these principles in pursuit of profit.
Anthropic has yet to respond publicly to the allegations.
Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, conveyed in an email to Technology News that the “commercial exploitation” of Reddit’s content by Anthropic could potentially yield billions in revenue.
“Reddit’s humanity is uniquely valuable in a world flattened by AI,” Lee emphasized. “People are increasingly seeking genuine human-to-human interaction. With nearly 20 years of rich dialogues on a wide array of topics, Reddit’s content is irreplaceable for training language models like Claude.”
In February 2024, Reddit signed a deal with Google to provide AI training data, with reports indicating that the agreement was valued at approximately $60 million annually.
This is not the first instance of legal issues for Anthropic, which is known for its Claude chatbot. The company has faced previous lawsuits pertaining to alleged copyright violations.
In August, a group of authors initiated a class-action lawsuit in a California federal court against Anthropic, claiming that the company had established a multibillion-dollar operation by illegally using hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books. Additionally, in October 2023, Universal Music filed a lawsuit in Tennessee against Anthropic, alleging widespread infringement of copyrighted song lyrics.
This trend reflects a growing concern among publishers and content creators regarding potential copyright infringements by AI companies. OpenAI, the developer behind ChatGPT, has been involved in a notable lawsuit led by The New York Times, alongside a class-action suit from authors including George R.R. Martin, and legal actions from publishers like The New York Daily News and The Chicago Tribune.
