It’s ironic that AI companies have no issue “stealing” content from publishers, photographers, and artists to train their models. However, when it comes to other AI models using their data, that’s a big no-no. In this instance, it looks like Reddit is filing a lawsuit against Anthropic and wants to sue them for unauthorized bots on its platform.
Reddit sues Anthropic
According to the lawsuit, Reddit isn’t thrilled that Anthropic has deployed bots on its platform, where it has accessed its content more than 100,000 times in July 2024. This is after Anthropic claimed it had blocked its bots from doing so.
In a scathing comment, Reddit says, “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.”
Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, also told The Verge that Anthropic’s unauthorized access to Reddit could be worth “billions of dollars.” Anthropic has yet to comment on the lawsuit, but this isn’t the first time the company has faced backlash over alleged copyright infringement.
He adds, “Reddit’s humanity is uniquely valuable in a world flattened by AI. Now more than ever, people are seeking authentic human-to-human conversation. Reddit hosts nearly 20 years of rich, human discussion on virtually every topic imaginable. These conversations don’t happen anywhere else—and they’re central to training language models like Claude.”
Anthropic’s legal woes
Just last August, Anthropic was hit with a class-action lawsuit in California. Three authors filed the lawsuit against the Amazon-backed AI company. They claimed that Anthropic had “built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.” And they’re not alone.
In October 2023, Universal Music also sued Anthropic over “systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics.” That being said, Anthropic isn’t alone in facing alleged copyright infringement. Many AI companies are facing a growing number of complaints from artists, writers, and photographers.
This is because in order for AI to be able to write or create, it needs to train itself on data, which AI companies have scraped from the internet. In some cases, some publishers have agreed to have their content used to train AI. For example, earlier this year, OpenAI announced a partnership with Axios. Google also inked a deal with Reddit to provide data for AI training.
