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

Reddit sued Anthropic connected Wednesday successful San Francisco superior court, claiming that the OpenAI rival had accessed its level much than 100,000 times since July 2024, aft Anthropic allegedly said it had blocked its bots from doing so. 

In the filing, Reddit calls Anthropic a “late-blooming artificial quality (‘AI’) institution that bills itself arsenic the achromatic knight of the AI industry,” alleging that “it is thing but.” 

“This lawsuit is astir the 2 faces of Anthropic: the nationalist look that attempts to ingratiate itself into the consumer’s consciousness with claims of righteousness and respect for boundaries and the law, and the backstage look that ignores immoderate rules that interfere with its attempts to further enactment its pockets.”  

Anthropic did not instantly supply a comment. 

Ben Lee, Reddit’s main ineligible officer, said successful an emailed connection to The Verge that Anthropic’s “commercial exploitation” of Reddit contented could beryllium worthy billions of dollars. 

“Reddit’s humanity is uniquely invaluable successful a satellite flattened by AI,“ Lee said. ”Now much than ever, radical are seeking authentic human-to-human conversation. Reddit hosts astir 20 years of rich, quality treatment connected virtually each taxable imaginable. These conversations don’t hap anyplace else—and they’re cardinal to grooming connection models similar Claude.”

Reddit inked a woody with Google successful February 2024 to supply AI grooming information to the company. Bloomberg reported astatine the clip that Reddit had signed a woody with an unnamed institution worthy about $60 million a year.

It’s not the archetypal clip the Amazon-backed AI startup, which is down the fashionable chatbot Claude, has been sued implicit alleged copyright infringement.  

Last August, 3 authors filed a class-action suit successful California national tribunal against Anthropic, alleging successful a filing that the institution had “built a multibillion-dollar concern by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.” And successful October 2023, Universal Music sued Anthropic successful a Tennessee national tribunal implicit “systematic and wide infringement of their copyrighted opus lyrics.” 

It’s portion of an expanding inclination of publishers and contented creators suing AI companies implicit alleged copyright infringement. OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, has been a cardinal portion of that conversation, pursuing a high-profile suit from The New York Times, a class-action suit from a radical of authors including George R.R. Martin, and a suit from the publishers of newspapers including The New York Daily News and The Chicago Tribune. And a radical of publishers including Condé Nast and Verge genitor institution Vox Media has sued AI institution Cohere for infringement.