Reddit raises its head and sues the AI company behind Claude

Reddit has sued Anthropic, the AI company behind the chatbot Claude. The accusation is of alleged “scraping,” meaning the unauthorized use of user comments from the social media platform to train the chatbot. Anthropic has stated that it will vigorously defend itself against the accusations. 

Reddit raises its head and sues the AI company behind Claude for unauthorized use of its content

Reddit has filed a lawsuit in the San Francisco Superior Court against the AI company Anthropic, for unauthorized use of its content. 

Anthropic allegedly engaged in illegal “scraping” of the comments of millions of users from the social media platform, to train its chatbot Claude. 

In a statement, Ben Lee, legal head of Reddit, stated:

“AI companies should not be allowed to collect information and content from people without clear limitations on how they can use such data”

The AI company would have resisted entering into a licensing agreement even though it trained its chatbot Claude on Reddit content. This happened despite last July Anthropic assured that it had blocked its bots from accessing the Reddit platform.

In any case, a spokesperson for Anthropic, stated the following:

“We do not agree with the statements of Reddit and we will defend ourselves vigorously”

Reddit: the new battle against AI and the chatbot Claude for alleged illegal “scraping”

With this complaint, Reddit initiates its first battle against AI and its alleged unauthorized use of third-party content by Artificial Intelligence companies. 

In this regard, the social media accused Anthropic of using automated bots to access Reddit’s content, despite being asked not to do so. 

Not only, for Reddit, the AI company has intentionally trained on users’ personal data, without ever asking for their consent.

In general, Reddit has already entered into licensing agreements with Google, OpenAI, and other companies that pay to train their AI systems on the public comments of Reddit’s over 100 million daily users.

Here too, Ben Lee from Reddit stated that:

“These agreements allow us to apply significant protections for our users, including the right to delete your content, the protection of user privacy, and the prevention of spam using this content”

In any case, Claude’s chatbot is the flagship product of Anthropic, a company founded by former OpenAI executives in 2021, and financially supported by Amazon and Alphabet (Google’s parent company). 

In this market, Claude sees only one key competitor, which is ChatGPT by OpenAI. 

And so, while OpenAI has close ties with Microsoft, the main commercial partner of Anthropic is Amazon, which is using Claude to improve its widely used voice assistant Alexa.

The case of the imitation of human distraction

The Anthropic chatbot, Claude, had made headlines when, during a test, it surprised researchers by interrupting work to browse images of Yellowstone.

This behavior has been characterized as an imitation of human distraction, raising questions about the development of AI. 

In fact, last November, many believed that Claude’s incident was the result of its programming, which, in addition to “learning” and “acting,” sometimes “adapts” and copies human behaviors.