The social network Reddit has sued artificial intelligence company Anthropic, claiming that it used its content to train its AI models without permission.
The social network Reddit has sued artificial intelligence company Anthropic, claiming that it used its content to train its AI models without permission.
According to Bloomberg, the lawsuit was filed on Wednesday in San Francisco Superior Court.
The document claims that Anthropic has attempted to access Reddit data more than 100,000 times since last July.
Reddit said that such «unauthorized commercial use of content» violates its rules and uses users' personal data without their consent.
An Anthropic spokesperson, in turn, said that the AI company disagrees with Reddit’s claims and «will vigorously defend itself.»
Interestingly, in its public communications, Anthropic, which was founded by a group of former OpenAI employees, has publicly taken a position that is much more focused on safety and responsibility than its competitors.
So Reddit called Anthropic’s emphasis on trust and honesty «empty marketing gimmicks.» The AI startup «positions itself as the white knight of the AI industry,» but «it is anything but,» Reddit’s lawsuit says.
«We believe in an open internet, but that doesn’t mean it’s open to commercial exploitation. We will not tolerate commercial entities like Anthropic exploiting billions of dollars’ worth of Reddit content without any compensation for our users or respect for their privacy,» Ben Lee, Reddit’s general counsel, said in an email.
In an interview with the publication, Lee said that Reddit had held several talks with Anthropic, trying to reach a licensing agreement, as it had with other AI companies such as OpenAI and Google. Before that, Reddit preferred to reach an agreement out of court because the legal process could be lengthy.
We previously wrote about Anthropic pulling talent from OpenAI and DeepMind.
In May, Anthropic introduced Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 — new AI models optimized for coding and complex problem-solving tasks.
