It is well known that the artificial intelligence industry is based on a shaky legal framework. Companies like OpenAI have built their multibillion-dollar businesses on vast amounts of training data, much of which comes from copyrighted content. The creators of this content know they are being ripped off, and this is increasingly leading to lawsuits. This week, we got another reminder of this conundrum when Reddit sued Anthropic for using editorial posts in its training data.
Reddit’s lawsuit, filed on Wednesday, accuses Anthropic, an Amazon-backed artificial intelligence company, of violating its user agreement. “Back in December 2021… Anthropic, without authorization and in direct violation of Reddit’s user agreement, trained Claude to respond to Reddit user posts,” the lawsuit says.
Anthropic, whose flagship product is the Claude chatbot, tries to position itself as a “good guy” in the AI industry – a company that plays by the rules and promotes AI frameworks that take into account security and ethical considerations. But despite its “white knight” PR, the company has repeatedly faced legal challenges that call into question its supposedly “ethical” business practices. This week’s lawsuit is yet another reminder of that.
The lawsuit accuses Anthropic of unjust enrichment, as well as violating the platform’s user agreement. The lawsuit claims that the company’s AI bots have visited its website more than 100,000 times since 2024.
“This case reveals two faces of Anthropic: a public face that tries to worm its way into the consumer’s mind with claims of righteousness and respect for borders and the law, and a private face that ignores any rules that impede its attempts to line its pockets even further,” the lawsuit says. It adds that Anthropic “continues to publicly acknowledge that it trains its artificial intelligence technology on Reddit content.”
When contacted for comment, a spokesperson for Anthropic provided the following statement: “We disagree with Reddit’s claims and will vigorously defend ourselves.”
The war over the use of content with artificial intelligence has become one of the industry’s most visible dilemmas. Platforms and authors are realizing that their content is being stolen to fuel AI, and they are starting the legal machine to fight back. So far, so many different people and institutions have filed lawsuits against OpenAI that it’s hard to keep track of them all – from Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nahisi Coates, George R.R. Martin, and Jonathan Franzen to the Center for Investigative Reporting, The Intercept, various newspapers (including The Denver Post and Chicago Tribune), and some YouTubers. The New York Times is currently suing the company on similar grounds.
Reddit is trying to protect itself from theft by developing contracts with AI companies that clearly specify the exchange of content for money. Last February, Reddit signed a deal with Google that allowed the tech giant to use content on its platform as fodder for AI, provided that the company would pay $60 million a year. Shortly thereafter, a similar deal was signed with OpenAI. It seems that Anthropic didn’t get the message about this, but now it definitely will. More and more it seems like this is the new model for the AI industry: To quote one of my favorite TV shows, you have to pay a troll tax if you don’t want to get sued. Obviously, this situation is beneficial to large companies. AI companies with sufficient resources will be able to buy access to large amounts of data to feed their AI habits. Smaller companies with fewer resources will be out of luck.
