Reddit accuses AI company Anthropic of accessing its content more than 100,000 times since July 2024, even though the company claimed to have blocked its bots in May of that year. Only paying parties are allowed to repost Reddit content.
Reddit filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in a San Francisco court on Wednesday. Reddit claims that the LLM creator has continuously visited the platform despite previous promises to stop doing so.
Before it became apparent that generative AI could be marketed via ChatGPT, the developers of this technology were already aware of the gold mine of content that Reddit represented. As a result, the social media site was a useful tool for finding the online material required to train pre-ChatGPT models like GPT-2 and the initial version of GPT-3. The comments of users themselves on the platform weren’t necessarily the most useful, which, like elsewhere on the internet, are intermittently attached to reality. However, the shared URLs represent a strong filter for content crawlers, as the hyperlinks from Reddit to external sites indicate that this information is actually being consulted. People decided something was worth reading, which meant it was useful for training an AI model, too.
Reddit fights back
In short, Reddit has something to defend. So it is fighting back. In the lawsuit, Reddit characterizes the company as a “late-blooming AI company that presents itself as a white knight” of the AI industry. The platform talks about two faces of Anthropic: a public face that tries to present itself as morally correct, and a true nature that ignores rules when they interfere with making a profit.
Ben Lee, Reddit’s legal director, emphasizes the unique value of Reddit’s content. “Reddit’s humanity is uniquely valuable in a world flattened by AI,” Lee said. He points out that the platform has hosted nearly 20 years of what he assesses to have been rich, human discussions on virtually every conceivable topic.
This valuable content is exactly what AI companies are looking for. It is now clear that this comes at a price. Google previously signed a $60 million per year deal with Reddit for AI training data. This shows that this information has enormous commercial value. Reddit previously shut down its previously free API to prevent AI scrapers, which led to the disappearance of alternative Reddit apps.
Growing legal battle
This is not the first time Anthropic has been taken to court. In August last year, three authors filed a class action lawsuit, claiming that the company had built a multi-billion dollar business by “stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.” Universal Music also sued the company for systematic infringement of song lyrics.