By buld_online 
Reddit has filed a lawsuit against AI startup Anthropic, accusing the company of unlawfully accessing its platform more than 100,000 times since July 2024 to harvest user-generated content, despite earlier assurances that its bots were blocked.
In the suit, filed Wednesday in San Francisco Superior Court, Reddit described Anthropic as a “late-blooming” artificial intelligence firm that publicly claims to uphold ethical standards but privately disregards them in pursuit of profit.
“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 filing states.
Anthropic has not issued a comment on the lawsuit at the time of writing.
Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, said in a statement to The Verge that the unauthorised use of Reddit’s vast repository of conversations could amount to “billions of dollars” in commercial value. “Reddit’s humanity is uniquely valuable in a world flattened by AI,” said Lee. “Now more than ever, people are seeking authentic human-to-human conversation. Reddit hosts nearly 20 years of rich, human discussion on virtually every topic imaginable. These conversations don’t happen anywhere else and they’re central to training language models like Claude.”
Anthropic, backed by Amazon, is the developer of Claude, a conversational AI assistant competing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company is already facing legal action from publishers and authors. In August 2023, it was sued by a group of writers who alleged that Anthropic’s AI models were trained on copyrighted books. In another case from October last year, Universal Music filed a lawsuit accusing the company of using protected song lyrics without permission.
This legal confrontation follows Reddit’s own steps to monetise its data. In February 2024, the company signed a deal with Google reportedly worth around $60 million annually to provide access to its content for AI training purposes.
The Reddit-Anthropic case adds to the growing number of legal battles between content creators and AI companies over copyright and data use. OpenAI, Meta, Cohere, and others have faced lawsuits from media outlets, book publishers, and authors seeking to establish clearer boundaries around what can and cannot be used to train large language models.