Social media platform Reddit has sued the bogus intelligence firm Anthropic, alleging that it’s illegally “scraping” the feedback of Reddit customers to coach its chatbot Claude.
Reddit claims that Anthropic has used automated bots to entry Reddit’s content material regardless of being requested not to take action, and “deliberately educated on the private knowledge of Reddit customers with out ever requesting their consent.”
Anthropic didn’t instantly return a request for remark Wednesday. Reddit filed the lawsuit Wednesday in California Superior Courtroom in San Francisco, the place each firms are based mostly.
“AI firms shouldn’t be allowed to scrape info and content material from folks with out clear limitations on how they’ll use that knowledge,” stated Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief authorized officer, in an announcement Wednesday.
Reddit has beforehand entered licensing agreements with Google, OpenAI and different firms to allow them to coach their AI programs on Reddit commentary.
These agreements “allow us to implement significant protections for our customers, together with the correct to delete your content material, consumer privateness protections, and stopping customers from being spammed utilizing this content material,” Lee stated.
Anthropic was fashioned by former OpenAI executives in 2021 and its flagship Claude chatbot stays a key competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Very like different AI firms, it’s relied closely on web sites akin to Wikipedia and Reddit which might be stuffed with wealthy sources of written supplies to show an AI assistant the patterns of human language
In a 2021 paper co-authored by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei — cited within the lawsuit — researchers on the firm recognized the subreddits, or subject-matter boards, that contained the best high quality knowledge, akin to these targeted on gardening, historical past or ideas folks have within the bathe.
Anthropic in 2023 argued in a letter to the U.S. Copyright Workplace that the “method Claude was educated qualifies as a quintessentially lawful use of supplies,” by making copies of data to carry out a statistical evaluation of a giant physique of information.
However Reddit’s lawsuit is completely different from others introduced in opposition to AI firms as a result of it doesn’t allege copyright infringement. As an alternative, it focuses on the alleged breach of Reddit’s phrases of use, and the unfair competitors, it says, was created.