Reddit is taking Anthropic to court, accusing the artificial intelligence company of pulling user content from the platform without permission and using it to train its Claude AI models. The lawsuit, filed in a California state court, claims Anthropic made more than 100,000 unauthorised requests to Reddit’s servers, even after publicly stating that it had stopped.
The case is built around Reddit’s claim that Anthropic ignored both technical restrictions and its terms of service. According to the complaint, Anthropic bypassed protections like the site’s robots.txt file, which is supposed to prevent automated scraping. Reddit also accuses Anthropic of violating user privacy by collecting and using personal posts—including deleted content—for commercial purposes.
Reddit says it offers structured access to its data through licensing agreements with companies such as OpenAI and Google. These deals include conditions around content use, privacy safeguards, and data deletion. According to the platform, Anthropic declined to pursue a formal agreement and instead scraped the site directly, avoiding licensing fees and skipping user protections in the process.
The lawsuit highlights a 2021 research paper co-authored by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, which pointed to Reddit as a rich source of training data for language models. Reddit also included examples where Claude appeared to reproduce Reddit posts nearly word for word, even echoing posts that had been deleted by users. That, the company says, shows Anthropic failed to put guardrails in place to respect user privacy or content takedowns.
Reddit is seeking financial damages and a court order that would stop Anthropic from using Reddit content in future versions of its models.
Anthropic has responded, claiming it disagrees with the cl