Reddit accused users of building a Claude AI model on the back of Reddit users and accusing them without permission and without paying for it.
Anyone using Reddit, even bots that are crawling the web, agree to a user agreement for the site. The contract is clear. You may not retrieve content from the Site and use it on your own commercial products without written transactions. Reddit claims that human bots have been doing it for years, rubbing a ton of conversations and posts to train and improve Claude.
What makes this lawsuit particularly tough is how we pursue humanity’s reputation. Humanity has worked hard to brand itself as an ethical and trustworthy AI company, the “white night” of the industry. However, the lawsuit calls these claims nothing more than “empty marketing gimmicks.”
For example, Reddit points to a statement from July 2024. There, they claimed that humanity had raw Reddit and stopped the bot. The lawsuit alleges that this was “false” and that the log caught a human bot trying to access the site more than 10,000 times the following month.
However, this is not just a corporate conflict. Your privacy is directly involved. If you delete a post or comment about Reddit, you’re expected to disappear. Reddit has official license transactions with other major AI players such as Google and Openai. These transactions include technical measures to ensure that AI companies will also delete the content when users delete it.
According to the Reddit lawsuit, Anthropic has no such transaction and refuses to enter it. This means that if their AI is trained on a later deleted post, they can burn that content into Claude’s knowledge base and effectively ignore the choice to remove it. The lawsuit also includes screenshots in which Claude itself admits there is no real way to know if the trained reddit data was later deleted by the user.
So, what does Reddit want? It’s not just about money, but they are seeking damages such as increased server costs and loss of license fees. They are asking the court for an injunction to force humanity to immediately halt the use of reddit data.
Additionally, Reddit wants to prohibit humanity from selling or licensing products constructed using that data. This means they are asking the judges to effectively take Claude from the market.
This case forces tough questions. Does being “publicly available” on the Internet mean that the content that companies can acquire and monetize is free? Reddit has claimed that companies are “no” and the outcome could change rules about how AI will be developed from now on.
(Photo: Brett Jordan)
See: Hallucination Engagement: MIT Spinout teaches AI to admit that it is ignorant
Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out the AI & Big Data Expo in Amsterdam, California and London. The comprehensive event will be held in collaboration with other major events, including the Intelligent Automation Conference, Blockx, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.
Check out other upcoming Enterprise Technology events and webinars with TechForge here.
