Ohh, Ouch, Anthropic

Oh boy. It looks like Anthropic’s "holier-than-thou" act has finally run into a wall. Just a couple of weeks after they were patting themselves on the back for Claude 4, Reddit dropped a lawsuit that is as blunt as it is damning. And frankly, it’s 100% correct.

For years, Anthropic has been insufferable about its commitment to safety, honesty, and ethics. They even registered as a "Public Benefit Corporation," which legally means they're supposed to care about more than just money. How does secretly stealing data, after promising to stop, serve the public's best interest? It seems they only care about the "benefit" part when it benefits their own pockets. They aren't just as bad as the others. They're worse, precisely because they are massive hypocrites.

Let's get straight to the lawsuit. Reddit caught their bots scraping its site more than 100,000 times. This was after Anthropic had already agreed to stop about a year ago. One hundred thousand times! There are no excuses. That is a deliberate, systematic effort to crawl and steal a constant stream of data.

So, what was Anthropic's brave reply to getting caught red-handed? A statement that reeks of corporate lawyers: “we disagree with Reddit’s claims, and we will defend ourselves vigorously.”

Hmm. You "disagree"? Does that mean you didn't do it, Anthropic? No, of course not. "Disagree" is the word you use when you know for a fact you did it and got caught.

And this isn't some one-off mistake. It's a pattern. Last year, music publishers like Universal sued them for the exact same thing, hoovering up copyrighted song lyrics to feed Claude. This is just who they are.

Anthropic had a clear choice. They could follow their competitors, Google and OpenAI, who sat down with Reddit and wrote a check for around $60 million for a legitimate data license. But when Anthropic saw that price tag, they must have decided it was time to hoist the Jolly Roger. 'Yarr, ahoy matey!' they probably said, deciding it was cheaper to just plunder the data and hope their ship was fast enough to get away with the loot.

They thought they could get away with it by banking on their "fair use" BS they've been trying for years. Their argument is a convenient legal fantasy: they claim they aren't copying the data, just "learning" from it to create something "transformative".

Yeah, the billions dollars company is advocating for "fair use" which actually translate to = They want a free and open internet so they can feed their own closed, proprietary AI model with free data. Then they turn around and charge everyone for access to that product.

Who is seriously going to look at this and think, "Yes, Anthropic is clearly in the right here"? They lied to Reddit. They have a history of scraping content without consent. They "advocate" for free data while virtue signaling and being the most pretentious company in the entire generative AI bubble.

The moral of the story is simple. Big corporations aren't your friends. It's your data and your money that they care about, no matter what they claim. All the companies involved in this space sucks, but I do hope Anthropic gets the big kick in the arse it deserves for this one.