Reddit Sues Anthropic, but Not for Copyright Infringement

Earlier this month, I wrote about the Disney and Universal lawsuit against Midjourney, alleging that the AI developer violated their copyrights in its AI training and outputs. This style of copyright case against AI developers has become more common as rights holders seek to stop AI developers from using their works without permission. However, a new case brought by Reddit is challenging  Anthropic, the developer of Claude, in a unique way. Rather than focusing on copyright, Reddit is alleging that Anthropic is liable under tort and contract law for violating Reddit’s licensing agreement. A recent memo from SheppardMullin discusses the case:

“Unlike recent enforcement efforts that have centered on establishing copyright infringement liability, Reddit’s complaint brings five causes of action—breach of contract, unjust enrichment, trespass to chattels, tortious interference, and unfair competition—reflecting a strategic choice to deploy contractual and privacy-based claims to address Anthropic’s allegedly unauthorized scraping of Reddit data.”

Reddit allows licensed AI partners to scrape users’ posts and provides guidelines and an API for doing so. However, Reddit is alleging that Anthropic refused to enter into a licensing agreement and instead scraped data from Reddit in an unauthorized capacity. In addition to denying Reddit compensation, this scraping also allegedly violated users’ privacy. Reddit licensees normally have deleted posts removed from the AI training data. In Anthropic’s case, Reddit asserts that this procedure was not followed and that the AI was trained on restricted content. Reddit’s legal strategy of going for contractual and tort claims rather than copyright is interesting. Rather than waiting to see how AI copyright cases shake out, pursuing alternative theories may be the safer play. If the lawsuit is successful, we could see other Plaintiffs adopt this strategy, particularly in cases centering around user-generated content.