• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, Yesterday

The social platform Reddit has sued Anthropic for allegedly training its artificial intelligence chatbot Claude on material posted by Reddit users.

“The unauthorized commercial use of Reddit content harms Reddit, which has established a market for licensing content, through which Reddit imposes meaningful guardrails on the use of such content to protect both Reddit and its users,” the company alleges in a complaint filed Wednesday in San Francisco County Superior Court.

“Based in part on the use of Reddit content, Anthropic’s Claude quickly joined ChatGPT as one of the most advanced AI chatbots created to date, notable for enabling users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language used,” Reddit alleges.

The company, which has entered into licensing deals with Google and artificial intelligence company OpenAI, alleges that Anthropic misrepresented its practices. Reddit specifically alleges that in July 2024, after it said Anthropic was “unlawfully exploiting” content, an Anthropic spokesperson said that Reddit had been placed on a block list.

“That statement was false,” Reddit alleges, adding that its audit logs “show that Anthropic continued to deploy its automated bots to access Reddit content more than one hundred thousand times in the subsequent months.”

The social platform's complaint includes claims that Anthropic violated Reddit's terms of service, which prohibit companies from scraping content without a licensing agreement. That agreement requires licensees to use an application programming interface (referred to in the court papers as the Compliance API) that notifies them if users delete posts or comments, according to the complaint.

“By executing formal licensing agreements, Reddit ensures programmatic mechanisms are in place to respect its users’ privacy rights,” the complaint says. “Without these formal agreements in place, Reddit cannot ensure that its users’ deletion requests are respected by third parties accessing Reddit content.”

Reddit is seeking an injunction prohibiting Anthropic from using Reddit data, and monetary damages -- including “restitution for the amount by which Anthropic has been enriched by its scraping and use of Reddit content.”

Anthropic is facing a separate lawsuit by music companies that allege Anthropic violated copyright law by using lyrics to train its artificial intelligence models.

In March, the judge presiding over that matter refused the music companies' request to prohibit Anthropic from using lyrics for training purposes, ruling that questions surrounding artificial intelligence companies' use of copyrighted content were too unsettled to warrant .

“It is an open question whether training generative AI models with copyrighted material is infringement or fair use,” U.S. District Court Judge Eumi Lee in the Northern District of California wrote in that case.

Reddit's complaint doesn't allege copyright infringement in its complaint, but at least one judge ruled in a different matter that claims over the alleged misappropriation of data raise copyright issues -- and are therefore governed by federal copyright law.