Reddit Sues Anthropic for Scraping Forums Without Permission

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Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Anthropic after accusing the AI company of repeatedly crawling Reddit’s forums without permission and in violation of the platform’s content usage policy. The case highlights the rising tensions between generative AI firms and online platforms, whose communities generate vast amounts of free, valuable content.

Reddit brought the case to the Superior Court of California in San Francisco on June 4.

“For its part, despite what its marketing material says, Anthropic does not care about Reddit’s rules or users: it believes it is entitled to take whatever content it wants and use that content however it desires, with impunity,” Reddit’s attorneys wrote in the filing.

Anthropic failed to make a deal for Reddit content, claimed to stop crawling the site

In July 2024, Reddit publicly posted a content policy stating that it would enter into licensing arrangements with certain large language model makers.

Google and OpenAI agreed to those arrangements. As a result, some content returned by Gemini or ChatGPT may have been trained on Reddit content with Reddit’s consent. The licensing arrangements require the partner AI companies to adhere to restrictions, such as not using deleted posts or targeting ads directly at Redditors.

While the full details of the contracts remain confidential, Bloomberg reported that one arrangement may have been worth $60 million and contributed to Reddit’s initial public offering (IPO) valuation.

Anthropic did not sign a similar deal. Despite publicly stating that Reddit had been added to its crawler block list in July 2024, Reddit claims that the company continued to collect data from its platform. The lawsuit alleges that Anthropic’s systems accessed Reddit more than 100,000 times since that date.

A growing rift between AI firms and content platforms

Reddit’s thriving community produced 2.72 billion comments and interactions in 2024. That makes it rich ground for AI chatbots and search results. Reddit has a reputation for providing practical, specific information and has been touted as an alternative to an increasingly homogeneous slate of Google Search results.

However, the platform’s uneasy relationship with AI companies reflects that of major media outlets, such as The New York Times’ deal with Amazon or OpenAI’s partnership with Axios, which feed editorial content into AI in exchange for monetary support and other initiatives.