Reddit, a social media site, filed a lawsuit against Anthropic on Wednesday, claiming that the artificial intelligence firm is unlawfully "scraping" millions of Reddit users' comments in order to train its chatbot Claude.
Reddit alleges that Anthropic "intentionally trained on the personal data of Reddit users without ever requesting their consent" and utilised automated bots to access Reddit's material in spite of being requested not to.
In a response, Anthropic stated that it "will defend ourselves vigorously" against Reddit's allegations. Reddit filed the complaint Wednesday in California Superior Court in San Francisco, where both firms are headquartered.
“AI companies should not be allowed to scrape information and content from people without clear limitations on how they can use that data,” noted Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, in a statement Wednesday.
Reddit has previously entered into licensing deals with Google, OpenAI, and other companies who pay to train their AI systems on Reddit's over 100 million daily users' public comments.
The contracts "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," according to Lee.
The license agreements also helped the 20-year-old internet platform acquire funds ahead of its Wall Street debut as a publicly traded business last year. Former OpenAI executives founded Anthropic in 2021, and its primary chatbot, Claude, remains a prominent competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT. While OpenAI has close relationships with Microsoft, Anthropic's principal commercial partner is Amazon, which is utilising Claude to develop its popular Alexa voice assistant.
Anthropic, like other AI businesses, has relied extensively on websites like Wikipedia and Reddit, which contain vast troves of written material that can help an AI assistant learn the patterns of human language.
In a 2021 paper co-authored by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, which was cited in the lawsuit, the company's researchers identified the subreddits, or subject-matter forums, that contained the highest quality AI training data, such as those focused on gardening, history, relationship advice, or shower thoughts.
In 2023, Anthropic stated in a letter to the United States Copyright Office that the "way Claude was trained qualifies as a quintessentially lawful use of materials," by making copies of information to do a statistical analysis on a big dataset. It is already facing a lawsuit from major music companies who claim Claude regurgitates the lyrics of copyrighted songs.
However, Reddit's lawsuit differs from others filed against AI companies in that it does not claim copyright violation. Instead, it focusses on the alleged breach of Reddit's terms of service, which it claims resulted in unfair competition.