Reddit has filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence firm Anthropic, accusing it of unlawfully scraping user comments to train its chatbot Claude. The lawsuit, filed in California’s San Francisco Superior Court, claims that Anthropic used bots to bypass Reddit’s rules and harvested massive amounts of data without permission or user consent.
Reddit alleges that Anthropic deliberately trained its AI on personal user data from Reddit’s platform, despite the absence of any formal agreement. Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, said, “AI companies should not be allowed to scrape information and content from people without clear limitations on how they can use that data.”
While Reddit has licensing agreements with companies like Google and OpenAI for AI training, it asserts that these are structured to include strict privacy protections, the right to delete content, and user safeguards against spam. The platform, with over 100 million daily active users, has long been a goldmine of conversational data for developing large language models, the foundation of tools like ChatGPT and Claude.
Reddit’s move signals a growing demand for accountability in the AI sector, as tech firms increasingly rely on public data to train their models without always securing explicit permission.
