Reddit sues AI company Anthropic for allegedly ‘scraping’ user comments to train chatbot

The social media platform Reddit has sued the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, alleging that it is illegally “scraping” the comments of Reddit users to train its chatbot Claude.

Reddit claims that Anthropic has used automated bots to access the social network’s content despite being asked not to do so, and “intentionally trained on the personal data of Reddit users without ever requesting their consent”.

Anthropic did not immediately return a request for comment. The claim was filed on Wednesday in the superior court of California in San Francisco.

“AI companies should not be allowed to scrape information and content from people without clear limitations on how they can use that data,” said Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, in a statement on Wednesday.

Reddit has previously entered licensing agreements with Google, OpenAI and other companies to enable them to train their AI systems on Reddit commentary. The large quantity of text generated by Reddit’s 100 million daily active users has played a part in the creation of many large language models, the type of AI that underpins ChatGPT, Claude and others.

Those agreements “enable us to enforce meaningful protections for our users, including the right to delete your content, user privacy protections, and preventing users from being spammed using this content”, Lee said.