Reddit sues AI company Anthropic for allegedly ‘scraping’ user comments to train chatbot Claude

Social media platform Reddit has sued the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, alleging that it is illegally “scraping” the comments of Reddit users to train its chatbot Claude.

Reddit claims that Anthropic has used automated bots to access Reddit’s content despite being asked not to do so, and “intentionally trained on the personal data of Reddit users without ever requesting their consent.”

Anthropic didn’t immediately return a request for comment Wednesday. Reddit filed the lawsuit Wednesday in California Superior Court in San Francisco, where both companies are based.

“AI companies should not be allowed to scrape information and content from people without clear limitations on how they can use that data,” said Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, in a statement Wednesday.

Reddit has previously entered licensing agreements with Google, OpenAI and other companies to enable them to train their AI systems on Reddit commentary.

Those agreements “enable us to enforce meaningful protections for our users, including the right to delete your content, user privacy protections, and preventing users from being spammed using this content,” Lee said.

Anthropic was formed by former OpenAI executives in 2021 and its flagship Claude chatbot remains a key competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Much like other AI companies, it’s relied heavily on websites such as Wikipedia and Reddit that are full of rich sources of written materials to teach an AI assistant the patterns of human language

In a 2021 paper co-authored by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei — cited in the lawsuit — researchers at the company identified the subreddits, or subject-matter forums, that contained the highest quality data, such as those focused on gardening, history or thoughts people have in the shower.

Anthropic in 2023 argued in a letter to the U.S. Copyright Office that the “way Claude was trained qualifies as a quintessentially lawful use of materials,” by making copies of information to perform a statistical analysis of a large body of data.

But Reddit’s lawsuit is different from others brought against AI companies because it doesn’t allege copyright infringement. Instead, it focuses on the alleged breach of Reddit’s terms of use, and the unfair competition, it says, was created.