Reddit sues Anthropic, alleging its bots accessed Reddit more than 100,000 times

Reddit sued Anthropic on Wednesday in San Francisco superior court, claiming that the OpenAI rival had accessed its platform more than 100,000 times since July 2024, after Anthropic allegedly said it had blocked its bots from doing so.

In the filing, Reddit calls Anthropic a “late-blooming artificial intelligence (‘AI’) company that bills itself as the white knight of the AI industry,” alleging that “it is anything but.”

“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.”

Anthropic did not immediately provide a comment.

Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, said in an emailed statement to The Verge that Anthropic’s “commercial exploitation” of Reddit content could be worth billions of dollars.

“Reddit’s humanity is uniquely valuable in a world flattened by AI,“ Lee said. ”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.”

Reddit inked a deal with Google in February 2024 to provide AI training data to the company. Bloomberg reported at the time that Reddit had signed a deal with an unnamed company worth about $60 million a year.

It’s not the first time the Amazon-backed AI startup, which is behind the popular chatbot Claude, has been sued over alleged copyright infringement.

Last August, three authors filed a class-action lawsuit in California federal court against Anthropic, alleging in a filing that the company had “built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.” And in October 2023, Universal Music sued Anthropic in a Tennessee federal court over “systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics.”

It’s part of an increasing trend of publishers and content creators suing AI companies over alleged copyright infringement. OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, has been a key part of that conversation, following a high-profile lawsuit from The New York Times, a class-action lawsuit from a group of authors including George R.R. Martin, and a lawsuit from the publishers of newspapers including The New York Daily News and The Chicago Tribune. And a group of publishers including Condé Nast and Verge parent company Vox Media has sued AI company Cohere for infringement.