Social media platform Reddit sued the substitute intelligence firm Anthropic on Wednesday, alleging that it’s illegally “scraping” the feedback of thousands and thousands of Reddit customers to coach its chatbot Claude.
Reddit claims that Anthropic has used automated bots to entry Reddit’s content material regardless of being requested not to take action, and “deliberately educated on the non-public information of Reddit customers with out ever requesting their consent.”
Anthropic stated in an announcement that it disagreed with Reddit’s claims “and can defend ourselves vigorously.”
Reddit filed the lawsuit Wednesday in California Superior Courtroom in San Francisco, the place each corporations are based mostly.
“AI corporations shouldn’t be allowed to scrape info and content material from folks with out clear limitations on how they will use that information,” stated Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief authorized officer, in an announcement Wednesday.
Reddit has beforehand entered licensing agreements with Google, OpenAI and different corporations which are paying to have the ability to prepare their AI methods on the general public commentary of Reddit’s greater than 100 million day by day customers.
These agreements “allow us to implement significant protections for our customers, together with the best to delete your content material, consumer privateness protections, and stopping customers from being spammed utilizing this content material,” Lee stated.
The licensing offers additionally helped the 20-year-old on-line platform elevate cash forward of its Wall Avenue debut as a publicly traded firm final 12 months Amongst those that stood to profit was OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who accrued a stake as an early Reddit investor that made him one of many firm’s largest shareholders.
Anthropic was shaped by former OpenAI executives in 2021 and its flagship Claude chatbot stays a key competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Whereas OpenAI has shut ties to Microsoft, Anthropic’s major industrial accomplice is Amazon, which is utilizing Claude to enhance its broadly used Alexa voice assistant.
Very like different AI corporations, Anthropic has relied closely on web sites similar to Wikipedia and Reddit which are deep troves of written supplies that may assist educate an AI assistant the patterns of human language.
In a 2021 paper co-authored by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei — cited within the lawsuit — researchers on the firm recognized the subreddits, or subject-matter boards, that contained the very best high quality AI coaching information, similar to these centered on gardening, historical past, relationship recommendation or ideas folks have within the bathe.
Anthropic in 2023 argued in a letter to the U.S. Copyright Workplace that the “manner Claude was educated qualifies as a quintessentially lawful use of supplies,” by making copies of knowledge to carry out a statistical evaluation of a big physique of information. It’s already battling a lawsuit from main music publishers alleging that Claude regurgitates the lyrics of copyrighted songs.
However Reddit’s lawsuit is completely different from others introduced towards AI corporations as a result of it doesn’t allege copyright infringement. As an alternative, it focuses on the alleged breach of Reddit’s phrases of use, and the unfair competitors, it says, was created.
This story was initially featured on Fortune.com
