Reddit is taking Anthropic to court, alleging that the AI startup helped itself to the platform’s vast library of user-generated content — after saying it wouldn’t.
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in a Northern California state court, Reddit accused Anthropic of unlawfully scraping the site more than 100,000 times since July 2024, despite having previously told Reddit that it had blocked its bots from doing so.
“This case is about the two faces of Anthropic,” Reddit’s legal team wrote in the filing. “The public face that attempts to ingratiate itself with claims of righteousness and respect for boundaries and the law and the private face that ignores any rules that interfere with its attempts to further line its pockets.”
“Reddit brings this action to stop Anthropic — who tells the world that it does not intend to train its models with stolen data — from doing just that.”
Anthropic spokesperson Danielle Ghighlieri said in a statement to The Verge that the company disputes Reddit’s claims “and will defend ourselves vigorously.”
The suit signals a broader battle over the material that underpins AI. Reddit — which has signed multimillion-dollar data licensing deals with Google (GOOGL) and OpenAI — has argued that its platform isn’t just another public website but a valuable archive of human conversation that shouldn’t be used without permission or payment.
“Reddit’s humanity is uniquely valuable in a world flattened by AI,” Reddit chief legal officer Ben Lee said in a statement. He told TechCrunch, “We will not tolerate profit-seeking entities like Anthropic commercially exploiting Reddit content for billions of dollars without any return for redditors or respect for their privacy.”
Reddit has said that it tried to negotiate a license with Anthropic and made it clear that the company wasn’t allowed to scrape data — only to discover that Anthropic allegedly kept siphoning data anyway. Reddit is asking for damages, restitution, and a court order barring further use of its data.
In the filing, Reddit calls Anthropic a “late-blooming” AI company “that bills itself as the white knight of the AI industry” — that “is anything but.”
The lawsuit also notes that Anthropic cited Reddit as a key training source in a 2021 research paper — underscoring that the platform’s data (queries and posts by real-life, everyday people) has been key in training AI systems such as Anthropic’s Claude.
The suit makes Reddit the first big tech company — not just a publisher or rights holder — to challenge an AI developer in court over training data. But Reddit is far from alone. Anthropic is already facing lawsuits from music publishers and authors who say their copyrighted works have been used without consent. OpenAI, Meta (META), and others are entangled in similar cases, including a high-profile suit from The New York Times (NYT).
For Reddit, the case is about more than legal boundaries — it’s about economic ones. The company recently went public and is looking to monetize the value of its nearly two decades of archived discussions. Its reported $60 million-per-year deal with Google, inked earlier this year, has helped set a baseline for how much AI companies might pay for access to high-quality training content.
And while Reddit has cut deals with firms such as OpenAI — whose CEO Sam Altman is Reddit’s third-largest shareholder — it says those agreements include user protections and proper compensation.
The post Reddit is suing Anthropic for allegedly stealing data to train its AI appeared first on Quartz.
