Social media platform Reddit sued the unreal intelligence firm Anthropic on Wednesday, alleging that it’s illegally “scraping” the feedback of tens of millions of Reddit customers to coach its chatbot Claude.
Reddit claims that Anthropic has used automated bots to entry Reddit’s content material regardless of being requested not to take action, and “intentionally trained on the personal data of Reddit users without ever requesting their consent.”
Anthropic mentioned in a press release that it disagreed with Reddit’s claims “and can defend ourselves vigorously.”
Reddit filed the lawsuit Wednesday in California Superior Courtroom in San Francisco, the place each firms are primarily based.
“AI companies should not be allowed to scrape information and content from people without clear limitations on how they can use that data,” mentioned Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief authorized officer, in a press release Wednesday.
Reddit has beforehand entered licensing agreements with Google, OpenAI and different firms which are paying to have the ability to prepare their AI techniques on the general public commentary of Reddit’s greater than 100 million every day customers.
These 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 mentioned.
The licensing offers additionally helped the 20-year-old on-line platform increase cash forward of its Wall Avenue debut as a publicly traded firm final 12 months Amongst those that stood to profit was OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who accrued a stake as an early Reddit investor that made him one of many firm’s greatest shareholders.
Anthropic was fashioned by former OpenAI executives in 2021 and its flagship Claude chatbot stays a key competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Whereas OpenAI has shut ties to Microsoft, Anthropic’s main industrial associate is Amazon, which is utilizing Claude to enhance its broadly used Alexa voice assistant.
Very like different AI firms, Anthropic has relied closely on web sites similar to Wikipedia and Reddit which are deep troves of written supplies that may assist educate an AI assistant the patterns of human language.
In a 2021 paper co-authored by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei — cited within the lawsuit — researchers on the firm recognized the subreddits, or subject-matter boards, that contained the best high quality AI coaching knowledge, similar to these targeted on gardening, historical past, relationship recommendation or ideas individuals have within the bathe.
Anthropic in 2023 argued in a letter to the U.S. Copyright Workplace that the “means Claude was educated qualifies as a quintessentially lawful use of supplies,” by making copies of knowledge to carry out a statistical evaluation of a big physique of knowledge. It’s already battling a lawsuit from main music publishers alleging that Claude regurgitates the lyrics of copyrighted songs.
However Reddit’s lawsuit is totally different from others introduced in opposition to AI firms as a result of it doesn’t allege copyright infringement. As an alternative, it focuses on the alleged breach of Reddit’s phrases of use, and the unfair competitors, it says, was created.
This story was initially featured on Fortune.com
