Social media platform Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, accusing the company of unauthorized use of platform content to train the Claude neural network. The case involves over 100,000 requests to the resource after implementing a web scraping ban.
G. Ostrov
Popular social media platform Reddit has initiated legal proceedings against Anthropic, the creator of the Claude language model. The lawsuit stems from alleged unauthorized use of Reddit content for artificial intelligence training purposes.
Nature of the Allegations
According to court documents, Anthropic made over 100,000 requests to Reddit\'s servers since July 2024, despite ignoring the established web scraping prohibition. Reddit claims the company violated technical restrictions, including the robots.txt file, which should prevent automated data collection.
Reddit is particularly concerned that Anthropic has allegedly been copying platform content since December 2021, systematically ignoring established technical barriers.
Reddit\'s Position
Reddit\'s Chief Legal Officer Ben Lee emphasized the duplicitous nature of Anthropic\'s approach: \"The company publicly declares respect for boundaries and law, while simultaneously ignoring any rules that prevent it from making money.\" In his opinion, the \"commercial exploitation\" of Reddit content should cost Anthropic billions of dollars.
Lee noted the central role of live discussions from Reddit and similar platforms in training modern language models, emphasizing the uniqueness and value of content created by platform users.
Licensing Market Context
It\'s worth noting that in February 2024, Reddit entered into an official agreement with Google to provide data for AI training. According to Bloomberg, such a license costs approximately $60 million per year, demonstrating the commercial value of the platform\'s user-generated content.
Other Legal Cases
Reddit is not the only company to have filed claims against Anthropic. In 2023, Universal Music and other music labels sued the company for using song lyrics. By the end of 2024, the parties settled the dispute out of court.
Also in August 2024, three book authors initiated a class action lawsuit regarding the use of \"hundreds of thousands of books\" to train Claude without appropriate permissions from rights holders.
This legal dispute reflects growing tension between technology companies developing AI and content owners regarding fair use and compensation for intellectual property.
For additional information, visit Anthropic\'s official website.
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