Reddit filed a lawsuit Wednesday in California against AI startup Anthropic, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company is accused of unlawfully scraping Reddit content without a licensing agreement. Reddit accused Anthropic of using its user data for commercial purposes without consent or a licensing agreement, violating its data policy. The complaint alleges Anthropic trained its AI on Reddit users’ data while claiming to uphold ethical standards. Anthropic denied the allegations and said it would defend itself. Reddit created a public content policy and updated its backend to limit unauthorized scraping and protect user data. The company said it failed to reach a deal with Anthropic and discovered the AI firm accessing its site despite claiming to have blocked its bots. Reddit has signed profitable licensing agreements with OpenAI and Google, granting access to its user-generated content. AI executives value Reddit data for its rich conversational interactions across over 100,000 subreddits.
