Reddit sues Anthropic over AI content scraping • The Register

Reddit, the favored web dialogue discussion board, sued Anthropic on Wednesday, alleging that the AI biz scraped content material generated by its customers in violation of contractual phrases and technical obstacles.

The complaint [PDF], filed in San Francisco Superior Court docket on Wednesday, claims Anthropic’s use of scraper bots to gather Reddit violates the location’s Consumer Settlement and represents unfair competitors underneath California regulation.

Whereas different AI giants have entered into licensing agreements and respect customers’ alternative, Anthropic has not

“Anthropic is a late-blooming synthetic intelligence (‘AI’) firm that payments itself because the white knight of the AI trade,” the grievance says. “It’s something however. Anthropic says – usually and loudly – that it ‘prioritize[s] honesty’ and is guided by ‘unusually excessive belief.’ These claims are empty advertising gimmicks.”

The authorized submitting argues that Anthropic has deliberately educated its fashions on the private information of Reddit customers with out requesting consent. It additionally contends that Anthropic’s 2024 declare to have restrained its content material harvesting crawlers after receiving complaints was disingenuous.

In July 2024, restore group website iFixit stated Anthropic crawlers had visited the location more than a million times in a single day.

On the time, web site publishers had been changing into more hostile to AI crawlers harvesting data and all the foremost business AI mannequin makers had been taking steps to make sure that their bots revered directions that net publishers embed in robots.txt information – the commonly-used technique of leaving directions for a way bots ought to behave when visiting a website.

Bots and their operators will not be technically or legally obligated to observe stated directives, however publishers can cite non-compliant crawlers to help claims of wrongdoing.

Anthropic on the time supplied assurances that its ClaudeBot would abide by website visitation restrictions. The Reddit lawsuit claims the AI biz hasn’t accomplished so, although it doesn’t cite examples of alleged robots.txt violations by Anthropic after July 2024.

However different firms, such as Vercel and Sourcehut, have complained of improper crawling from unnamed bots since that point.

In Could 2024, Reddit signed a content licensing deal with OpenAI to incorporate Reddit content material within the corpus it makes use of to make AI fashions. Though the discussion board website concluded that deal a number of months after its preliminary public providing, income from content material licensing seems to have turn into an essential a part of the marketing strategy.

On Reddit’s Q1 2025 earnings conference call [PDF], CEO Steve Huffman stated, “I believe our early premise was appropriate, which is any search firm, any AI firm, wants an ongoing provide of latest data, particularly new related data.”

“So our technique continues to be the identical, which is let’s do all the pieces. Let’s be open and open for enterprise. Let’s construct our personal merchandise on prime of our personal corpus and do our greatest to ensure the Reddit data is accessible in as many verticals as attainable.”

The grievance notes that Reddit has struck content material licensing offers with the likes of OpenAI, Google, Sprinklr, and Cision however has been unable to take action with Anthropic.

“Anthropic refused to have interaction,” the grievance states. “Thus, whereas different AI giants have entered into licensing agreements and agreed to respect customers’ decisions (together with by deleting posts that Redditors selected to delete), Anthropic has not.”

Reddit’s authorized salvo seems to not have introduced Anthropic to the bargaining desk.

“We disagree with Reddit’s claims and can defend ourselves vigorously,” an organization spokesperson informed The Register.

Dismissive of Anthropic’s moralizing and unable to shut a licensing deal, Reddit has solid itself because the defender of the “Open Web.”

“We imagine within the Open Web – that doesn’t give Anthropic the appropriate to scrape Reddit content material unlawfully, exploit it for billions of {dollars} in revenue, and disrespect the rights and privacy of our users,” a Reddit spokesperson informed The Register.

“In clear violation of Reddit’s phrases and regardless of repeated requests to cease, Anthropic has been caught accessing or trying to entry Reddit content material by way of automated bots not less than 100,000 instances. This isn’t a misunderstanding, it’s a sustained effort to extract worth from Reddit whereas ignoring authorized and moral boundaries.

“We’re submitting this lawsuit in step with our Public Content material Coverage and as our last choice to power Anthropic to cease its illegal practices and abide by its claimed values.” ®