Reddit on Wednesday sued Anthropic for “unlawfully exploiting” its content to train its Claude artificial intelligence model without its consent.
The social platform, in its lawsuit filed in San Francisco, said Anthropic feels “entitled to take whatever content it wants and use that content however it desires, with impunity.” Anthropic, Reddit claims, has used bots to scrape its site more than 100,000 times since July 2024, when Reddit said it needed to pay if it wanted to access its content.
“We disagree with Reddit’s claims and will defend ourselves vigorously,” an Anthropic spokesperson told TheWrap.
Reddit’s lawsuit said Anthropic has billed itself as the “white knight” of the AI industry by stressing respect for content owners and personal data. But those claims are just “empty marketing gimmicks,” Reddit said in its lawsuit.
Anthropic suffers from corporate cognitive dissonance—its actions do not mirror its claimed values,” the lawsuit said.
“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.”
The issue of how copyrighted material is used by AI companies has been the focus of several lawsuits in recent years. The New York Times sued OpenAI in late 2023 for using its content without consent; that lawsuit is currently moving forward after a judge denied the ChatGPT parent company’s request to dismiss the case in March.
Other media companies, like The New York Daily News, have also sued OpenAI for using their articles without permission. On the other end, several media companies, including News Corp. and Vox Media, have made content-sharing deals with OpenAI, and Reddit on Thursday noted it has a partnership with OpenAI as well.
OpenAI, led by CEO Sam Altman, has advocated for the Trump Administration to help make it easier for AI companies to use copyrighted material to train their models. That plan received stiff pushback from more than 400 Hollywood creators, including Aubrey Plaza, Ben Stiller, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, earlier this year; you can read more about their concerns by clicking here.
