“Lawsuit galore!”: Fans react as Reddit sues AI startup Anthropic for allegedly using personal user data without consent

Reddit is suing AI startup ‘Anthropic’ for allegedly training their model on personal user data without consent.

Reuters has reported that the microblogging platform filed the lawsuit against the artificial intelligence startup on Wednesday in San Francisco Superior Court, accusing the latter of stealing data to train its AI models, despite issuing a public announcement to the contrary.

Per the outlet, Anthropic's investors include Amazon and Alphabet (Google's parent company). The complaint is the latest in a long line of battles against AI companies' alleged use of third-party content without acquiring proper authorization beforehand.

Internet sleuths have since begun chiming in on X, such as this one user who quipped:

"Lawsuits galore"

The comments don't end there. Someone on X opined:

"AI is taking over the world"

Another chimed in:

"I thought anthropic was supposed to be cool, whos idea was it to train on reddit data, that's just crazy"

One more user commented:

"Training a model with any data from Reddit is a horrible place to start"

A fourth user questioned:

"Should it not be the users suing them?"

Even more chimed in with more remarks, questions, and opinions. One user wrote:

"Oh snap! This is huge news. Looks like the battle over data consent is really heating up"

Someone else claimed:

"This is gonna become the norm, get used to it"

Another user wondered out loud:

"AI SUED FOR STEALING OUR PERSONAL DATA ARE WE SURPRISED??"

Yet another user noted:

"Rare Reddit W. AI companies should not train their models on our data without our consent. Reddit better get a good lawyer"

Users were visibly opinionated in this case.

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Everything we know about Reddit and Anthropic's ongoing legal battles:

The Guardian reports that Reddit is accusing Anthropic of illegally “scraping” its comments and content to train its chatbot, Claude. Reddit claims that the company

“intentionally trained on the personal data of Reddit users without ever requesting their consent."

Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, issued a statement on Wednesday:

“AI companies should not be allowed to scrape information and content from people without clear limitations on how they can use that data."

He went on, stating:

"We believe in an open internet," but AI companies need "clear limitations" on how to use the content they scrape.

However, Anthropic is pushing back on these claims, as they reportedly said:

"We disagree with Reddit's claims and will defend ourselves vigorously."

Reddit has also quoted Claude conceding to being "trained on at least some Reddit data." It also claims that Anthropic's bots have been trying to or already have accessed Reddit's data over 100,000 times, which goes against the company's alleged themes of being an AI "white knight" that is truthful and honest.

"Anthropic refuses to respect Reddit's guardrails and enter into a license agreement," the complaint reportedly states.

The Guardian has pointed out that Reddit is currently in partnership with Google, OpenAI, and other companies that grant them permission to train their AI systems with Reddit content. Reddit has actively contributed to the development of ChatGPT, Claude, and more, the outlet reports.

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.

However, in infringing on Reddit's content, the company violated Reddit's user policy and "enriched itself to the tune of tens of billions of dollars," as the complaint added, according to Reuters.

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