Reddit Sues Anthropic for Alleged Unauthorized Use of Training Data

Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging that the AI startup used Reddit’s data to train its AI models without a proper licensing agreement. According to the complaint filed in a Northern California court, Reddit claims Anthropic’s unauthorized use of its data for commercial purposes was unlawful and violated Reddit’s user agreement.

This lawsuit marks the first instance of a major tech company legally challenging an AI model provider over its training data practices. It joins a growing number of publishers and content creators who have taken similar legal action against tech companies.

Other notable cases include The New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for training AI models on its news articles without permission or payment. Additionally, authors like Sarah Silverman have sued Meta for training AI models on their books without approval. Music publishers and artists have also filed claims against AI audio, video, and image generation startups, alleging misuse of their content.

“We will not tolerate profit-seeking entities like Anthropic commercially exploiting Reddit content for billions of dollars without any return for redditors or respect for their privacy,” said Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, in a statement to TechCrunch.

Reddit has previously entered into agreements with other AI model providers like OpenAI and Google, allowing them to train AI models on Reddit’s data. These deals ensure that Reddit’s posts can appear in the AI chatbots’ answers, subject to terms that protect users’ interests and privacy.

Interestingly, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, holds an 8.7% stake in Reddit, making him the third-largest shareholder. He also previously served on the company’s board of directors.

According to the complaint, Reddit approached Anthropic and made it clear that the AI startup did not have authorization to scrape or use Reddit’s content. However, Reddit claims that Anthropic “refused to engage.”

In response, Anthropic spokesperson Danielle Ghighlieri stated, “We disagree with Reddit’s claims and will defend ourselves vigorously,” in an emailed statement to TechCrunch.

Reddit also alleges that Anthropic’s scraper bots ignored Reddit’s robots.txt files, which are meant to signal to automated systems not to crawl websites. Despite Anthropic’s claim in 2024 to have blocked its bots from scraping Reddit, the platform alleges that Anthropic’s bots continued to scrape it more than 100,000 times.

Reddit is seeking compensatory damages, restitution for the amount by which Anthropic has been enriched by scraping Reddit’s content, and an injunction prohibiting Anthropic from continuing to use Reddit’s content.