Reddit, now a publicly traded company, has found one of its primary revenue streams in licensing its content to AI firms in exchange for compensation. Among those that have formal agreements to access Reddit’s data are Google and OpenAI. However, some companies have attempted to covertly extract data without remuneration.
Recently, Reddit filed a lawsuit against the artificial intelligence firm Anthropic, accusing it of using Reddit data to train AI models without proper authorization. Reddit contends that this unlicensed use for commercial purposes constitutes a violation of its user agreement.
Notably, the lawsuit sheds light on questionable practices by certain AI companies. Anthropic is alleged to have ignored Reddit’s robots.txt directives—a file explicitly instructing web crawlers not to access specified content—yet still proceeded to scrape the platform’s data.
The controversy surrounding data scraping by AI companies has intensified in recent months. A significant number of firms reportedly disregard such protocol files and subject websites to high-frequency scraping, often likened to DDoS-style attacks, leaving many site administrators overwhelmed.
Furthermore, Reddit claims it previously attempted to negotiate a data licensing agreement with Anthropic, clearly communicating that unauthorized scraping and use of content would breach its terms. However, Anthropic declined to pay or enter into any formal contract.
In response, Reddit is seeking financial restitution for the profits Anthropic allegedly gained through illicit access to its content. The company is also petitioning the court for an injunction to prohibit Anthropic from continuing to use any Reddit material.
Anthropic has yet to issue a detailed response to the lawsuit but has stated that it disagrees with Reddit’s assertions and intends to vigorously defend its position.
