Social media platform Reddit is suing the artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic for allegedly "scraping" millions of user comments to train its chatbot Claude.
In a lawsuit filed in the California Superior Court, Reddit claims Anthropic 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 said in a statement that it disagreed with Reddit’s claims "and will defend ourselves vigorously".
"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 to the Associated Press.
Reddit's suit is the latest against the AI company. Another suit from major music publishers alleges that Claude regurgitates the lyrics of copyrighted songs.
Yet, this lawsuit deals with the alleged breach of Reddit's terms of use and unfair competition, unlike the other suits that claim copyright infringement.
Anthropic 'identified subreddits with high-quality AI data'
Reddit has licensing agreements with Google, OpenAI, and other companies that pay to train their AI systems on the public commentary of Reddit's more than 100 million daily users.
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.
Much like other AI companies, Anthropic has relied heavily on websites such as Wikipedia and Reddit, that are deep troves of written materials that can help teach an AI assistant the patterns of human language.
A 2021 paper co-authored by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei cited in the lawsuit shows that company researchers identified the subreddits or forums that contained the highest quality AI training data.
These included subreddits on gardening, history, relationship advice, 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.
