Reddit, a social media platform, brought suit against Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup, alleging that the startup had unlawfully scraped millions of user comments to train its Claude chatbot without authorization or payment.
The case in a California state court is the most recent development in the ongoing conflict between AI firms and content creators over the use of data to train ever-more-complex language models that drive the generative AI revolution.
In 2021, former leaders from OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, launched Anthropic, which is valued at $61.5 billion and has strong support from Amazon.
The company, which is well-known for its AI models and Claude chatbot, presents itself as being concerned with responsible development and AI safety.
The complaint claims that since at least December 2021, Anthropic has been using Reddit content to train its models. CEO Dario Amodei co-authored research papers that specifically identified high-quality content for data training.
According to the lawsuit, Anthropic's automated systems continued to collect Reddit's servers more than 100,000 times in the months that followed, even after the firm publicly said that it had stopped its bots from accessing Reddit.
Reddit is requesting a court order and monetary damages to compel Anthropic to abide with the provisions of its user agreement. A jury trial has been requested by the corporation.
Google and OpenAI are among the other AI behemoths with which Reddit has signed licensing deals that permit them to access Reddit material as long as they respect user privacy and provide the site payment.
Since going public in 2024, those agreements have contributed to an increase in Reddit's share price.
After hearing about the lawsuit, Reddit's stock ended Wednesday's trading day up more than six percent.
News outlets, musicians, authors, and visual artists have filed lawsuits against the numerous AI businesses that exploited their data without their consent or remuneration.
Fair use is typically invoked by AI businesses to justify their methods, arguing that training AI on massive datasets essentially alters the original content and is essential for innovation.
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Even though the majority of these cases are still in the early phases, the results could significantly impact how the AI sector develops.