Reddit sues AI company Anthropic for allegedly ‘scraping’ user comments to train chatbot Claude

Social media platform Reddit has sued the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, alleging that it is illegally “scraping” the comments of Reddit users to train its chatbot Claude.

Reddit claims that Anthropic has used automated bots to access Reddit’s content despite being asked not to do so, and "intentionally trained on the personal data of Reddit users without ever requesting their consent."

Anthropic didn't immediately return a request for comment Wednesday. The claim was filed Wednesday in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco.

"AI companies should not be allowed to scrape information and content from people without clear limitations on how they can use that data," said Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, in a statement Wednesday.

Reddit has previously entered licensing agreements with Google, OpenAI and other companies to enable them to train their AI systems on Reddit commentary.

Those agreements "enable us to enforce meaningful protections for our users, including the right to delete your content, user privacy protections, and preventing users from being spammed using this content," Lee said.