Reddit Sues Anthropic Over Alleged Unauthorized AI Training Scraping

On June 4, 2025, Reddit filed suit against Anthropic in California Superior Court in San Francisco, where both companies are based. 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 said the aim of the suit was to seek damages and compel Anthropic to abide by its contractual and legal obligations, and it asked for a jury trial.

The complaint was unusually combative, opening by calling Anthropic a "late-blooming" AI company that "bills itself as the white knight of the AI industry" and adding, "It is anything but." It alleged that Anthropic "does not care about Reddit's rules or users" and believed it was "entitled to take whatever content it wants." Reddit alleged that Anthropic used automated bots, including ClaudeBot, to train Claude on Reddit posts and comments without a license and without user consent, and it quoted Claude itself admitting it was "trained on at least some Reddit data" while unable to say whether deleted content had been removed. The filing also cited a 2021 paper co-authored by Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei in which company researchers identified the subreddits containing the highest quality AI training data, such as forums on gardening, history, relationship advice and shower thoughts.

A central factual allegation was that Anthropic publicly assured in July 2024 that it had blocked its bots from crawling Reddit, yet its bots accessed or attempted to access the platform more than 100,000 times afterward. "Anthropic refuses to respect Reddit's guardrails and enter into a license agreement," the complaint said, contrasting it with Google and OpenAI, which pay to train on the public commentary of Reddit's more than 100 million daily users under licensing terms Reddit says include user-privacy protections.

Anthropic rejected the claims outright: "We disagree with Reddit's claims and will defend ourselves vigorously," a spokesperson said. The company, formed by former OpenAI executives in 2021 and whose backers include Amazon and Google parent Alphabet, had told the U.S. Copyright Office in 2023 that the way Claude was trained "qualifies as a quintessentially lawful use of materials," and it was already defending a suit by major music publishers over song lyrics. It had been valued at $61.5 billion in a March 2025 funding round.

Reddit, which held its IPO in 2024 and carried a market capitalization of about $22 billion, saw its shares close up more than 6% on the day of the filing; OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, whose company is a licensed partner, is a former Reddit board member and one of its biggest shareholders.