Reddit is taking AI company Anthropic to court, claiming the startup scraped its platform for user comments without permission and used them to train its chatbot, Claude.
The lawsuit, filed in California Superior Court in San Francisco, says Anthropic used automated bots to pull data from Reddit, even after being told not to.
Reddit claims the company then trained its AI models using that content, which includes personal information from users, without asking for consent.
“AI companies should not be allowed to scrape information and content from people without clear limitations on how they can use that data,” said Reddit’s chief legal officer Ben Lee.
Anthropic disagrees with the claims. In a statement, the company said it “will defend ourselves vigorously.”
Reddit Has Licensing Deals—And This Wasn’t One Of Them
Reddit has licensing agreements with companies like Google and OpenAI, which allow them to access Reddit’s public data in exchange for payment.
According to Reddit, these deals come with protections like the ability for users to delete their content and privacy safeguards.
Those agreements “enable us to enforce meaningful protections for our users,” Lee said, adding that they also help prevent user data from being used for spam.
One of the biggest licensing deals was Reddit’s agreement with Google, reportedly worth about $60 million per year, according to Reuters. The deal allows Google to use Reddit’s content to train its AI models.
That agreement, reportedly the first of its kind for Reddit, came as the platform sought to diversify revenue streams ahead of its long-anticipated IPO.
The licensing deals were also a key part of Reddit’s financial strategy leading up to its public listing last year.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of the IPO was OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, an early Reddit investor who became one of the company’s largest shareholders.
Anthropic’s AI Model Relied On Reddit
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees and has Amazon as its main commercial partner.
Amazon is using Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot, to improve its Alexa voice assistant.
Like other AI companies, Anthropic has trained its models on large amounts of publicly available text, including data from Wikipedia and Reddit.
A 2021 paper co-authored by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei even identified specific subreddits, like those about gardening, history, and relationship advice, as high-quality sources for training AI.
In a 2023 letter to the U.S. Copyright Office, Anthropic defended its training methods, saying they were lawful under fair use and involved creating copies of text to perform statistical analysis.
The company is already dealing with a separate lawsuit from music publishers who say Claude outputs copyrighted song lyrics.
What Makes Reddit’s Lawsuit Different
Reddit’s lawsuit isn’t about copyright. It focuses instead on Anthropic allegedly breaking Reddit’s terms of use and creating unfair competition by using data without a license.
This case stands out because Reddit isn’t arguing about copyright; it’s saying Anthropic broke its site rules.
Reddit’s main point is that tech companies should follow the rules when they’re clearly written in a site’s terms of use.