Benjamin Lee

Benjamin Lee is an American attorney who served as Reddit's chief legal officer and corporate secretary. He joined Reddit in September 2019 as executive vice president and general counsel, was named corporate secretary in October 2019, and was elevated to chief legal officer in March 2022. He holds a law degree from Columbia Law School and an undergraduate degree from Yale University.

Before Reddit, Lee held senior legal roles across the technology industry, including general counsel of the fintech company Plaid, and earlier legal positions at Airbnb, Twitter, and Google. As Reddit's top lawyer, he oversaw the company's legal, policy, trust-and-safety adjacent legal matters, and corporate governance functions, and he was a public voice on issues of platform liability and intellectual property.

Lee's tenure spanned a period of significant legal and regulatory activity for Reddit. These include the company's preparation for and execution of its March 2024 initial public offering, disputes over access to Reddit's data, and the broader industry debate about how user-generated platforms handle content moderation, copyright, and the use of platform data to train artificial-intelligence systems. He spoke publicly, including at academic and industry forums, about the legal questions raised by AI's use of online content. During his tenure Reddit's legal department also initiated 2025 litigation against Anthropic and against Perplexity AI and several data-scraping intermediaries over alleged unauthorized use of Reddit content to train AI systems.

As an executive officer of a publicly traded company, Lee was named in Reddit's regulatory filings and was among the leaders responsible for the company's compliance and disclosure obligations. His role placed him at the center of how Reddit navigates copyright, privacy, and platform-governance questions, areas that grew more consequential as Reddit licensed its data and positioned itself within ongoing debates over the legal status of AI training data. On August 12, 2026, Reddit disclosed in a Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission that Lee had notified the company of his intention to step down as chief legal officer and corporate secretary, effective September 14, 2026, remaining as an employee through September 25, 2026 to assist with the transition. Reddit said it expected to appoint Paul Cappuccio, described in the filing as an executive with 'deep leadership experience as a public company general counsel, executive, and board director,' as his successor. The filing did not state a reason for the departure and made no comment on Reddit's pending AI-scraping litigation. Coverage of Lee generally focuses on these governance and policy dimensions rather than on controversy attached to him personally.