Reddit files lawsuit against 'white knight' AI company, claiming it's really a villain

Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, one of the world's leading AI companies, over allegedly scraping the social media platform's data without its permission.

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The lawsuit, filed in the San Francisco Superior Court on Wednesday, claims that Anthropic used scraper bots to harvest Reddit data, violating the platform's User Agreement. The complaint states that Anthropic "bills itself as the white knight of the AI industry. It's anything but". The complaint adds that Anthropic pushes the message that it as a company "prioritizes honesty" and is "guided by unusually high trust". Reddit dismisses these affirmations, saying, "These claims are empty marketing gimmicks."

The complaint goes on to allege that Anthropic intentionally trained its AI models on Reddit data without first getting consent from the company. Additionally, Reddit claims that Anthropic's claim in 2024 that it stopped using content harvesting bots after it received complaints from the platform is false, with repair community website iFixit stating that Anthropic web crawlers landed on its website more than a million times in a single day in July 2024.

Websites typically use a robots.txt file to instruct how bots should be used on the website, and while bots, nor their operators, are legally obligated to follow these guidelines, publishers can use them to support claims of wrongdoing. Anthropic said at the time its ClaudeBot would abide by the robots.txt guidelines, but Reddit states within the lawsuit that Anthropic has violated its statement after its July 2024 statement.

Notably, AI companies such as OpenAI, Google, and others have entered into a licensing agreement with Reddit, which enable them to legally scrape the user data on the website. Reddit claims Anthropic refused to engage in a deal.

Anthropic has responded to the lawsuit, saying it disagrees with Reddit's claims and is prepared to defend itself "vigorously."

"Anthropic refused to engage," the complaint states. "Thus, while other AI giants have entered into licensing agreements and agreed to respect users' choices (including by deleting posts that Redditors chose to delete), Anthropic has not."

"We disagree with Reddit's claims and will defend ourselves vigorously," a company spokesperson told The Register