In a lawsuit with potentially major implications for artificial intelligence (AI) firms and content creators, Reddit on Wednesday sued Anthropic, claiming the startup trained its AI models on content from users of the popular forum without permission.
The social media company alleges Anthropic illegally trained the Claude chatbot on users’ posts, a violation of Reddit’s user agreement that bars anyone from “commercially exploiting” its services or content.
“This case is about the two faces of Anthropic: the public face that attempts to ingratiate itself into the consumer’s consciousness with claims of righteousness and respect for boundaries and the law, and the private face that ignores any rules that interfere with its attempts to further line its pockets,” the lawsuit said.
“[D]espite what its marketing material says, Anthropic does not care about Reddit’s rules or users: it believes it is entitled to take whatever content it wants and use that content however it desires, with impunity,” Reddit added.
To underscore its point, Reddit said it has reached agreements with OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.’s Google to train their models on the forum’s content under terms that “protect Reddit and its users’ interests and privacy.”
An Anthropic representative said the company vehemently objected to Reddit’s suit and “defend ourselves vigorously.”
The lawsuit is the latest in a series of cases over so-called data scraping by AI companies to mimic human intelligence to feed and train their models. Absent strong laws, content creators such as authors, news organizations, and artists have resorted to legal actions on the grounds of copyright infringement to protect their words and ideas. And legal experts expect more actions to come.
“You can see from the complaint that Reddit has put up a ‘do not scrape’ sign in essence, but none of the existing laws are really a good fit — it cannot be said unequivocally that it is illegal (either from a contractual or tortious vantage point) to do this,” intellectual property attorney Randy McCarthy said in an email. “Perhaps this signals that, if and when Congress takes up legislation to address the fair use aspects of training AI systems, that it will incorporate amendments to the federal unfair competition act to deal with whether it is unfair competition to scrape data from a commercial competitor.”
