Reddit warned Anthropic, but they ignored it, so now it’s going to court

Anthropic was warned one too many times about its Reddit data scraping.

Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, stating that the company used its data to train the Claude chatbot for years.

The dispute comes after months of Reddit protests against AI companies using its data.

The company claims the Claude chatbot was trained on its data starting in 2021. Reddit has also included a screenshot as proof, revealing how Claude acknowledged that it was trained on the company’s data.

A Reddit spokesperson said that the lawsuit was the last nail in the coffin, as the company had previously warned Anthropic to end its illegal practices.

The company claims that Claude’s creator violated Reddit’s terms and ignored its warnings to stop. Reddit says it caught Anthropic attempting or accessing its content through bots at least 100,000 times.

For companies like Anthropic, the discussion forum serves as a valuable source of information on which AI can be trained.

Reddit has signed profitable licensing agreements with companies like OpenAI and Google, allowing them to access its data.

The company has previously called out other companies, including Anthropic, for scraping its data. Because of this situation, Reddit started to limit automated scraping, letting companies know that they will need to pay for the data.

According to Reddit, as Anthropic refused to discuss the licensing situation, the company wants to show its “two faces.” The company believes that while Claude’s creator seems to position itself as a respectful and fair company, in reality, it actually ignores the rules, reports Engadget.

Regarding Anthropic, its spokesperson said that the company disagrees with Reddit’s claims.

The battle of content scraping has been happening for a while now. Last year, YouTube creators rose against tech giants such as Apple, NVIDIA, and Anthropic, which used subtitles from more than 173,000 YouTube videos to train their AI models.