Reddit Sues Anthropic For Alleged Illegal Use of Site Data for AI Training, a First In the Industry

There is a new conflict in the AI development space as Reddit has launched a landmark lawsuit against one of the top rising artificial intelligence companies, Anthropic, for allegedly using the site's data for illegal AI training. Over the past year, Reddit has established itself as a company that supports artificial intelligence development but comes at a cost as it licenses and partners with companies to gain access to its website's data.

Since it launched its IPO, Reddit has ensured that AI training is available for users who want it but would have to pay a certain fee based on their agreement to get licensed access to user posts and site content.

Reddit Sues Anthropic For Alleged Illegal AI Training

Reddit has filed a new complaint in Northern California, lodging their grievances against AI company, Anthropic, for allegedly using the site's content for AI training without the proper agreements with the renowned news aggregator platform. According to Reddit, they do not have any kind of agreements or licensing with Anthropic, claiming that the company used the platform's content and data for commercial purposes without the proper permissions.

In Reddit's complaint, the company claimed that what Anthropic did was "unlawful," and a massive violation of the platform's user agreement, with the company reinforcing its policies to license content to properly access its site's data for any kind of AI training.

According to TechCrunch, Reddit is joining the many companies who have lodged complaints against AI companies for alleged illegal data scraping and access, using it for the growth and evolution of their machine learning and language models.

Reddit v Anthropic: Landmark AI Training Case

This is also a landmark case for Reddit as it is marking the first time that the company is pursuing a case against AI companies for illegal access to its data. Moreover, this is also the first time that a Big Tech company is going against an AI company for AI training, joining the likes of The New York Times, authors like Sarah Silverman, and more who took OpenAI to the courts.

Artificial intelligence training has become rampant over the years, and while it first started as AI companies scraped massive amounts of data from the web without any consent or permissions, this greatly changed as companies came to license content.

Reddit's Licensing for AI Training

Instead of preventing AI companies from accessing their site's data including public content and user data, they opted to monetize from this experience to earn additional revenue from renowned companies developing artificial intelligence models.

Reddit is one of those companies that foster the use of their website's data for AI training, for a fee, as part of the company's significant move towards their first initial public offering that started last year. During this time, Reddit also announced to the world that it would allow AI training using its site data, and at the same time, the company also issued a warning against companies who illegally access their database without a prior licensing agreement with the company.

In its early days of offering this licensing deal, Google was the first partner by Reddit which allowed the company access to the site's data for AI training. Google's licensing deal with Reddit.