According to a complaint filed Wednesday in a Northern California court, Reddit accused of the humanity that it allegedly used to train AI models using data from the site without a proper licensing agreement. Reddit claims in a complaint that it is illegal for humanity to not allow data on the site for commercial purposes, and that the AI startup violated Reddit’s user agreement.
The Reddit lawsuit has joined a string of publishers who have legally challenged AI model providers over training data practices and sued high-tech companies for similar reasons.
The New York Times sued Openai and Microsoft for training news articles without payment or permission. Meanwhile, Sarah Silverman and other book authors sued Meta to train the book’s AI model without approval. Music publishers and artists have made similar claims against AI audio, video and image generation startups, claiming misuse of content.
In a statement to TechCrunch, Ben Lee, Chief Justice of Reddit, said:
In particular, Reddit is inked with other AI model providers, including OpenAI and Google, allowing these companies to train AI models with Reddit data and display site posts in the answers of their respective AI chatbots. However, the filing states that Reddit imposes certain conditions on Openai and Google that protect the interests and privacy of users.
Openai CEO Sam Altman has an 8.7% stake in Reddit, becoming the third largest shareholder and once a member of the company’s board of directors.
The filing claims that Reddit has approached humanity, revealing that AI startups do not have permission to scrape or use Reddit content. However, Reddit claims that humanity “refused to be involved.”
Humanity did not immediately provide a comment when TechCrunch reached it.
Reddit claims in a complaint that Anthropic’s scraperbot is ignoring the robots.txt file on social networks. Reddit argues that Anthropic’s AI chatbot, Claude, frequently refers to Reddit community and Reddit topics as further evidence that humanity has trained on Reddit data.
Reddit is asking for humanity to pay compensatory damages and seeks to restore the amount of money that has become richer by cutting Reddit content. Reddit also calls for an injunction prohibiting humanity from continuing to use Reddit’s content.