Reddit Sues Anthropic Over Alleged Unauthorized Data Scraping

Reddit has launched legal action against Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, alleging years of unauthorized data scraping from its platform. The social media giant claims that Anthropic has been using Reddit’s vast repository of online discussions without permission to train its AI models.

According to the lawsuit, Anthropic allegedly refused to participate in licensing discussions with Reddit, unlike other major AI companies such as Google and OpenAI, which have engaged in such negotiations. Reddit further alleges that Anthropic ignored user privacy concerns by failing to remove deleted posts from its training systems.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman had previously criticized Anthropic publicly for scraping the platform’s data. The company stated that filing the lawsuit was their last resort after attempting to resolve the issue through other means, describing it as necessary to stop what they characterize as Anthropic’s “unlawful practices.”

For its part, Anthropic has denied the allegations and announced its intention to “defend itself vigorously” against the claims.

This case highlights the increasing value of online discussion data for training generative AI models. Reddit’s extensive archive of user-generated content has become particularly valuable in the AI development ecosystem, making it an attractive target for companies building large language models.

The lawsuit reflects the growing tensions between content platforms and AI developers over data rights, ownership, and proper compensation for the use of user-generated content in AI training.