Reddit has filed a lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, alleging that the company illegally scraped user comments from Reddit to train its chatbot named Claude.
The lawsuit, filed in a California Superior Court in San Francisco, accuses Anthropic of using automated bots to access Reddit’s content without permission, gathering personal data of Reddit users without their consent.
The big picture: According to Reddit’s chief legal officer, Ben Lee, AI companies should not be allowed to gather information from individuals without clear restrictions on its use.
- Reddit previously had licensing agreements with Google and OpenAI, allowing these companies to train their AI systems using Reddit user commentary. These agreements helped raise funds for Reddit before its initial public offering.
Zoom in: Anthropic’s Claude chatbot competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and is primarily partnered with Amazon, using Claude to enhance its Alexa voice assistant.
- The company, formed by former OpenAI executives in 2021, relies heavily on platforms like Wikipedia and Reddit for data to train its AI.
