Reddit is taking Anthropic to courtroom, accusing the factitious intelligence firm of pulling person content material from the platform with out permission and utilizing it to coach its Claude AI fashions. The lawsuit, filed in a California state courtroom, claims Anthropic made greater than 100,000 unauthorised requests to Reddit’s servers, even after publicly stating that it had stopped.
The case is constructed round Reddit’s declare that Anthropic ignored each technical restrictions and its phrases of service. In accordance with the criticism, Anthropic bypassed protections like the location’s robots.txt file, which is meant to stop automated scraping. Reddit additionally accuses Anthropic of violating person privateness by accumulating and utilizing private posts—together with deleted content material—for industrial functions.
Reddit says it gives structured entry to its information by means of licensing agreements with firms similar to OpenAI and Google. These offers embody situations round content material use, privateness safeguards, and information deletion. In accordance with the platform, Anthropic declined to pursue a proper settlement and as an alternative scraped the location straight, avoiding licensing charges and skipping person protections within the course of.
The lawsuit highlights a 2021 analysis paper co-authored by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, which pointed to Reddit as a wealthy supply of coaching information for language fashions. Reddit additionally included examples the place Claude appeared to breed Reddit posts practically phrase for phrase, even echoing posts that had been deleted by customers. That, the corporate says, reveals Anthropic didn’t put guardrails in place to respect person privateness or content material takedowns.
Reddit is searching for monetary damages and a courtroom order that may cease Anthropic from utilizing Reddit content material in future variations of its fashions.
Anthropic has responded, claiming it disagrees with the claims and plans to defend itself. Nonetheless, this isn’t the primary time the company has come below authorized stress over the way it collects coaching information.
In August 2024, a bunch of authors filed a class-action lawsuit accusing Anthropic of utilizing their copyrighted work with out permission. They claimed that the agency skilled its fashions on books and different written supplies with out their consent after which requested compensation for utilizing their content material.
A similar case from October 2023 concerned Common Music Group and different publishers. They sued Anthropic over claims that its Claude chatbot was reproducing copyrighted music lyrics. The music firms argued that this use violated their mental property rights and requested the courtroom to dam additional use of their lyrics.
Not like these lawsuits, Reddit’s case doesn’t give attention to copyright. As an alternative, it centres on breach of contract and unfair competitors. Reddit’s argument is that the info taken from its website isn’t simply public—it’s ruled by phrases that Anthropic knowingly ignored. That distinction may make the case an vital one for different platforms that host person content material however wish to management the way it’s utilized in industrial AI techniques.
Reddit additionally accuses Anthropic of deceptive the general public. The lawsuit factors to public statements from Anthropic claiming it respects scraping guidelines and values person privateness, which Reddit says have been contradicted by the corporate’s actions.
“For its half, regardless of what its advertising and marketing materials says, Anthropic doesn’t care about Reddit’s guidelines or customers,” the lawsuit reads. “It believes it’s entitled to take no matter content material it desires and use that content material nevertheless it needs, with impunity.”
After the lawsuit was filed, Reddit’s inventory rose practically 67%, an indication that traders supported the transfer. The result of the case may set a precedent for a way firms strike a stability between open web content material and the rights of customers and content material homeowners.
As extra AI corporations depend on massive volumes of on-line information, the authorized and moral questions round scraping are getting tougher to disregard. Reddit’s case provides to the rising record of lawsuits shaping how this subsequent wave of AI growth unfolds.
(Photograph by Brett Jordan)
See additionally: Ethics in automation: Addressing bias and compliance in AI
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