Reddit Sues Anthropic Over Alleged Unauthorized AI Training Scraping
June 2025
Reddit sued Anthropic in California state court, alleging the AI company scraped Reddit content without a license to train its Claude models despite publicly claiming it had blocked its bots, with crawlers said to have accessed Reddit more than 100,000 times.
What happened
On June 4, 2025, Reddit filed suit against Anthropic in San Francisco Superior Court. Notably, the complaint was grounded in contract and state-law business and privacy theories rather than copyright, bringing causes of action for breach of contract, unjust enrichment, trespass to chattels, tortious interference, and unfair competition under California's Unfair Competition Law.
Reddit alleged that Anthropic used automated bots, including ClaudeBot, to access Reddit content and trained Claude on Reddit posts and comments, drawing on subreddits such as r/explainlikeimfive, r/WritingPrompts, and r/AskHistorians, without entering a licensing agreement and without obtaining user consent. Reddit emphasized the privacy dimension, alleging Anthropic's training data could include deleted or otherwise non-public posts.
A central factual allegation was that Anthropic publicly claimed around July 2024 that it had blocked its bots from crawling Reddit, but that Reddit's audit logs showed Anthropic bots accessed or attempted to access the platform more than 100,000 times in the months that followed.
Reddit contrasted Anthropic's behavior with that of OpenAI and Google, which it said are permitted to use public Reddit content only after agreeing to Reddit's paid licensing terms that include user-privacy protections. The case is significant for testing whether platforms can use contract, terms-of-service, and state unfair-competition law, rather than copyright, to control AI training data.
Impact
The lawsuit emerged as a key test of whether platforms can use contract and state unfair-competition law rather than copyright to control AI training data, potentially making paid licensing a gatekeeping requirement for using user-generated content.