According to a report, Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Anthropic over the alleged use of site data to train AI without a proper license agreement. Complaint was filed on Wednesday in a Northern California Court. Reddit claims that Anthropic’s use of site data for commercial purposes is illegal, and alleges that the AI startup violated Reddit’s user agreement.
With its lawsuit, Reddit becomes the first Big Tech firm to challenge an AI model provider’s training data practices. It joins a long list of publishers who have sued tech companies for similar reasons.
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft over training of its news articles that was done without payment or permission. Sarah Silverman, along with other authors of books, has sued Meta for training AI on their books without permission. Music publishers and artists also filed similar claims against AI audio-video-and image generation startups for alleged misuse of their content.
Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer said in a TechCrunch statement that “we will not tolerate profit seeking entities like Anthropic commercially exploitation Reddit content without any return to redditor or respect for their personal privacy.”
Reddit has signed deals with other AI models providers, including OpenAI, and Googlethat allows these companies to train AI model on Reddit data and have the site posts appear in their AI chatbots’ responses. Reddit claims that it has imposed certain terms on Google and OpenAI in order to protect its users’ privacy and interests.
Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. Reddithas an 8.7% stake, making him its third largest shareholder. He was also a former member of the board of directors.
Reddit claims in the filing that it contacted Anthropic, and made it clear to the AI startup that it did not have permission to scrape or utilize Reddit’s contents. Reddit claims that Anthropic has “refused engagement.”
Anthropic spokesperson Danielle Ghighlieri said in an email to TechCrunch, “We disagree with Reddit’s claims and we will defend ourselves vehemently.” Reddit alleges in its complaint
that Anthropic scraper bots ignored Reddit’s robots.txt file, a standard which signals automated systems not crawl websites. Anthropic claimed in 2024 to have blocked its bots from scraping Reddit, but the online community platform claims that Anthropic’s scraper bots scraped the platform more than 100,000 time after Anthropic made this claim. Reddit has asked Anthropic for compensatory damages and restitution of the amount Anthropic has benefited from scraping Reddit content. Reddit has also requested an injunction to prevent Anthropic from using Reddit’s contents. Maxwell Zeff, a senior reporter for TechCrunch who specializes in AI and emerging technology, is available at
. Zeff covered the rise and fall of AI, as well as the Silicon Valley Bank Crisis, for Gizmodo and MSNBC. He is based out of San Francisco. When he is not reporting, you can find him hiking, biking and exploring the Bay Area food scene.
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