Reddit Files Lawsuit Against AI Firm Anthropic for Data Misuse
Reddit has initiated legal proceedings against Anthropic, alleging systematic data scraping to train its Claude AI model without authorization. The social media platform claims Anthropic's web crawlers harvested content from thousands of subreddits, including popular communities like explainlikeimfive and AskHistorians, despite clear prohibitions in Reddit's robots.txt file.
The complaint reveals Anthropic allegedly conducted over 100,000 unauthorized scrapes after Reddit publicly blocked such activity in July 2024. This stands in contrast to competitors like OpenAI, which reportedly engaged in licensing negotiations. Reddit's lawsuit emphasizes the violation of its User Agreement prohibiting commercial content exploitation without consent.