Claude AI's parent company is being sued.

Reddit is an online forum where users can share their thoughts anonymously and interact with each other. Photo: Reuters .

At a court hearing in San Francisco on June 4th, Reddit stated that the AI company Anthropic had used its data for commercial purposes illegally, without paying fees and without complying with the platform's user data policies.

In the lawsuit, Reddit calls Anthropic a "latecomer AI company that claims to be the white knight of the AI industry. But in reality, it's not." The orange forum claims Anthropic accessed its platform more than 100,000 times since July 2024, despite previously claiming to have blocked bots that were no longer collecting data.

"Anthropic intentionally trained its AI model using Reddit users' personal data without their permission," the lawsuit states. This behavior contradicts the company's previous contributions to the artificial intelligence industry.

According to AI industry executives, data from Reddit is particularly useful for model training. The platform stores a wealth of conversational interactions between humans. There are currently over 100,000 active subreddits.

In the lawsuit, Reddit cites a 2021 study published by Anthropic. The AI company highlighted the usefulness of data from the online forum in training artificial intelligence models.

Ben Lee, Reddit's chief legal officer, said that the "commercial exploitation" of Reddit content could generate billions of dollars in value. The company said it had tried to negotiate with Anthropic but was unsuccessful. "We believe in an open internet. But that doesn't mean we're comfortable with being exploited," Lee said.

Reddit signed a contract with Google in February 2024 to provide AI training data to the company. According to Bloomberg , the online forum also signed a contract with an unnamed company worth approximately $60 million per year.

That same year, the company implemented several measures to limit unauthorized data collection on its website. They introduced a public content policy for user data that is publicly accessible, and updated the back-end source code. This data policy included user protections, such as ensuring that deleted posts and comments would not be included in data licensing agreements.

This isn't the first time this Amazon-backed AI startup has been sued for alleged copyright infringement. In August 2024, three authors filed a class-action lawsuit, alleging Anthropic "built a multi-billion dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books."

In October 2023, Universal Music also sued the company in federal court in Tennessee for “systematic and widespread copyright infringement of lyrics.” Developer Claude’s case is part of a growing trend of lawsuits against AI companies.

Recently, Anthropic launched its latest AI model, Claude Opus 4, which has been positively received by the AI community and scored highly in industry benchmarks. According to WSJ sources, an Anthropic spokesperson said the company disagrees with the allegations from Reddit and will defend itself vigorously.