Reddit sues Anthropic over alleged unlicensed scraping for AI training

On 4 June 2025 Reddit, Inc. filed suit against Anthropic, PBC, the AI company behind the Claude assistant, in San Francisco Superior Court (Case No. CGC-25-625892). Reddit alleged that Anthropic had scraped Reddit's content to train its models without a licensing agreement, in violation of Reddit's user agreement and terms governing automated access. The suit was part of a broader pattern in which Reddit, having struck paid data-licensing deals with other AI companies, moved aggressively against those it accused of taking its content without paying.

Reddit's complaint alleged that Anthropic accessed Reddit's site through automated means more than 100,000 times after July 2024, even after Anthropic had represented that it had blocked its bots from doing so, and that this activity disregarded Reddit's robots.txt and access restrictions. Notably, Reddit did not bring a copyright claim. Instead it asserted five state-law causes of action: breach of contract, unjust enrichment, trespass to chattels, tortious interference, and unfair competition under California's Section 17200. The choice to plead state-law theories rather than copyright was strategic and would prove central to the litigation's early procedural path.

Anthropic removed the case to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (Case No. 3:25-cv-05643), where it was assigned to Judge Trina Thompson. A key threshold dispute was whether Reddit's state-law claims were preempted by federal copyright law — which would keep the case in federal court — or whether they were genuinely distinct contract and tort claims that belonged in state court. On 30 March 2026 the court held that the claims were not preempted by the Copyright Act and remanded the case back to San Francisco Superior Court.

At that stage the litigation remained pending, with no ruling on the merits of whether Anthropic had in fact breached Reddit's terms or was liable for the conduct alleged. The remand decision was a procedural ruling about the proper forum, not a determination of liability, and Reddit's allegations about the scale and nature of the scraping remained allegations.

For an archive of Reddit controversies, the case is important as one of Reddit's own offensive lawsuits in the AI era, distinct from the separate action it brought against Perplexity and various scraper companies. It documents how Reddit converted the value of its user-generated content into a litigation and licensing strategy, asserting contract and unfair-competition theories rather than copyright to police unlicensed AI training. It also illustrates a live legal question of the period — the extent to which platform terms of service can be enforced against AI companies that ingest public-facing content — and should be described as a pending matter in which the underlying claims were not yet proven.