Social media platform Reddit filed a lawsuit against Anthropic on Wednesday, accusing the AI startup of illegally extracting millions of user comments to train its chatbot, Claude, without permission or compensation.
The lawsuit, filed in a California court, represents the latest front in the escalating battle between content providers and AI companies over the use of data to train increasingly sophisticated language models fueling the generative AI revolution.
Anthropic, valued at $61.5 billion and backed by Amazon, was founded in 2021 by former executives from OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.
The company, known for its chatbot, Claude, and AI models, focuses on AI safety and responsible development.
The lawsuit states, "This case concerns two faces of Anthropic: the public face, which attempts to appeal to consumer awareness by claiming integrity, respect for boundaries, and the law, and the private face, which ignores any rules that hinder its attempts to increase its profits."
According to the complaint, Anthropic has been training its models on Reddit content since at least December 2021, with CEO Dario Amodei co-authoring research papers that identified high-quality content for training the data.
The lawsuit alleges that despite Anthropic's public claims that its bots were blocked from accessing Reddit, its automated systems continued to collect data from Reddit's servers more than 100,000 times in the following months.
Reddit is seeking monetary damages and an injunction to compel Anthropic to comply with the terms of its user agreement. The company has requested a jury trial.
In response to the lawsuit, Anthropic said in an email to AFP, "We disagree with Reddit's claims and will vigorously defend ourselves."
Reddit has entered into licensing agreements with other AI groups, including Google and OpenAI, allowing these companies to use Reddit content under terms that protect user privacy and provide compensation to the platform.
These deals have helped boost Reddit's stock price since its 2024 IPO.
Reddit shares closed up more than 6% on Wednesday following news of the lawsuit.
.jpg)
0 Comments