AI Startup Anthropic Faces Reddit's Legal Fire Over Data Scraping Across 100K+ Accesses Starting July 2024
Reddit (NYSE:RDDT) has filed a lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court against artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, claiming the firm scraped Reddit content more than 100,000 times without permission, to train its Claude chatbot, Reuters reports.
The lawsuit alleges Anthropic, which is backed by Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG, GOOGL)), violated Reddit's user agreement and intentionally ignored robots.txt instructions, which is a standard signal to bots not to crawl a site, TechCrunch says. According to Reddit, the scraping began in July 2024 after Anthropic had publicly committed to blocking its bots from the site, Reuters reports.
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According to TechCrunch, Reddit says it approached Anthropic with licensing options, similar to those it already established with OpenAI and Google. Anthropic, however, declined to participate in any formal agreement, continuing to ingest Reddit content despite explicit warnings.
Claude Allegedly Trained On Reddit Data Without Safeguards
Reuters says that Reddit cited Claude's own statements admitting it was trained on "at least some Reddit data" and indicated uncertainty about whether deleted user content was included in the training set.
The online discussion platform claims Anthropic profited from this activity "to the tune of tens of billions of dollars," while refusing to offer compensation or uphold community trust. In its complaint, Reddit described Anthropic as styling itself as a "white knight" of AI ethics, while violating terms of service repeatedly, Reuters reports.
Anthropic spokesperson Danielle Ghighlieri told TechCrunch in a statement that the company disagrees with Reddit's claims and intends to defend itself vigorously.
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A First For Big Tech And A Sign Of What's Coming
TechCrunch says that Reddit's lawsuit marks the first time a major tech platform has taken legal action against an AI model developer over training data access without a license.
This move comes on the heels of similar lawsuits filed by other content creators and publishers. The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) for using its articles, while authors like Sarah Silverman and several musicians have launched lawsuits against Meta (NASDAQ:META) and others for similar data practices.
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