Reddit has initiated a lawsuit against AI company Anthropic for utilising data from the online discussion platform without a licensing agreement.
The legal complaint submitted to the San Francisco Superior Court represents the most recent conflict concerning the supposed unauthorised usage of third-party content by AI firms. Anthropic receives financial backing from notable investors, including Amazon.com and Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
“Anthropic is in fact intentionally trained on the personal data of Reddit users without ever requesting their consent,” Reddit said, arguing that this behaviour contradicts the company’s reputation as the “white knight of the AI industry”.
Reddit’s chief legal officer, Benjamin Lee, told The Verge that Anthropic’s “commercial exploitation” of Reddit content could have been worth billions of dollars.
Last year, Reddit implemented measures to curb unauthorised scraping of its platform by establishing a public content policy for user data available to the public, including posts made on subreddits, and updating its back-end code. This user policy provides safeguards for users, such as ensuring that deleted posts and comments are excluded from data-licensing agreements.
In the lawsuit, Reddit stated that it attempted but failed to negotiate with Anthropic and discovered that Anthropic was accessing its site despite claiming to have blocked its bots from doing so.
This legal dispute stems from Reddit’s own initiative to monetise its data.
“Now, more than ever, people are seeking authentic human-to-human conversation. Reddit hosts nearly 20 years of rich, human discussion on virtually every topic imaginable. These conversations don’t happen anywhere else—and they’re central to training language models like Claude,” Lee said in an email to The Verge.
In February 2024, the company announced a partnership with Google, reportedly valued at approximately $60 million per year, to allow access to its content for AI training purposes.
The Reddit and Anthropic case contributes to the increasing number of legal disputes between content creators and AI firms regarding copyright and data usage. OpenAI, Meta, Cohere, and other companies have encountered lawsuits from media organisations, book publishers, and authors aimed at clarifying the limitations on what can be utilised to train large language models.
In August 2024, three writers initiated a class-action lawsuit in a California federal court against Anthropic, claiming in their filing that the company had “created a multibillion-dollar enterprise by appropriating hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books”. In October 2023, Universal Music Group filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in a federal court in Tennessee for “systematic and widespread violation of their copyrighted song lyrics”.
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