The suit raises a host of questions. Is Perplexity's agent a rogue buyer with unacceptable security risks, or is Amazon bullying an insurgent competitor out of the game? Whose interests does a semi-autonomous AI agent represent, the customer or the agent's maker, and who is liable for its misconduct? The next iteration of AI may hang in the balance of the suit.
Ben Lee, chief legal officer at Reddit, told The Register in an emailed statement that AI companies are desperate for quality content generated by real people and that need is fueling an industrial scale data laundering economy. "Scrapers bypass technological protections to steal data, then sell it to clients hungry for training material," said Lee. "Reddit is a prime target because it's one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created."
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"I scraped millions of Google Maps restaurant reviews, and gave each reviewer's profile picture to an AI model that rates how hot they are out of 10," says San Francisco-based website creater Riley Walz. "This map shows how attractive each restaurant's clientele is. Red means hot, blue means not."
The letter outlined not only the improper access engineers had to WhatsApp user data, but a variety of other shortcomings, including a "failure to inventory user data," as required under privacy laws in California, the European Union, and the FTC settlement, failure to locate data storage, an absence of systems for monitoring user data access, and an inability to detect data breaches that were standard for other companies.
Reddit has charged Anthropic with training its AI, Claude, on user posts without consent, highlighting a shift towards monetizing access to digital content.
