Reddit Sues Anthropic Over Alleged Unauthorised Use of User Data for AI Training
Reddit is also seeking a court injunction to bar Anthropic from further using its content
Reddit has filed a lawsuit against AI startup Anthropic, accusing it of using Reddit’s content to train its models without a proper licensing agreement.
Reddit claims it explicitly warned Anthropic against scraping its platform, but Anthropic allegedly ignored these warnings and continued to scrape Reddit over 100,000 times—even after stating it had blocked such activity in 2024.
The platform also accuses Anthropic’s bots of bypassing its robots.txt protocols, which signal bots not to crawl certain web pages.
The complaint, filed in a Northern California court on Wednesday, alleges Anthropic violated Reddit’s user agreement and unlawfully profited from commercial use of its data.
This marks the first lawsuit by a major tech company targeting an AI model provider over data scraping.
Reddit, which has struck licensing deals with OpenAI and Google under strict user-protection terms, is seeking compensatory damages, restitution, and an injunction against Anthropic.
Anthropic, backed by Amazon and Google, said it disagrees with the allegations and will “defend itself vigorously.”
Anthropic already faces lawsuits from Universal Music and a group of authors over similar claims involving unlicensed training on copyrighted material.
Earlier this year, Anthropic rival OpenAI, argued before the Delhi High Court that copyright protection in news reporting is limited due to the overriding public interest in the free flow of information.
The statement came in response to a copyright infringement suit filed by news agency Asian News International (ANI).