Reddit files lawsuit against Anthropic over alleged AI training on scraped user content

Reddit has taken legal action against AI startup Anthropic, accusing the company of unlawfully scraping content from its platform to train the Claude AI chatbot, despite public promises to avoid such practices. The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco, marks a major escalation in the ongoing battle over

Reddit has filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, accusing it of scraping vast amounts of user-generated content from the platform to train its AI models without permission.

The lawsuit, lodged in San Francisco Superior Court on Wednesday, alleges that Anthropic used Reddit content to train its Claude chatbot, even after publicly stating last July that it had blocked its bots from accessing Reddit’s servers. The company, backed by tech giants Amazon and Alphabet (Google’s parent company), is now facing claims of violating Reddit’s user policy and unjustly enriching itself "to the tune of tens of billions of dollars."

“We believe in an open internet,” said Reddit Chief Legal Officer Ben Lee. “But AI companies need clear limitations on how they use content they scrape.”

According to the complaint, Anthropic's bots accessed—or attempted to access—Reddit content more than 100,000 times, despite repeated requests to enter into a licensing agreement. Reddit highlighted that unlike Google and OpenAI, Anthropic has refused to respect platform guardrails or formalize content usage.

Reddit further pointed to statements from Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, which reportedly admitted it had been trained on "at least some Reddit data" and was unsure whether that data had since been deleted.

In a statement, Anthropic responded:

“We disagree with Reddit’s claims and will defend ourselves vigorously.”

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages, restitution, and a court order preventing Anthropic from using Reddit content for commercial purposes.

The case marks the latest flashpoint in a broader debate over how AI companies gather training data—often from publicly available platforms—without compensating content creators.

Anthropic launched its latest models, Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, on May 22. The company’s annualized revenue has reportedly surged to $3 billion, according to sources familiar with its financials.

Both Reddit and Anthropic are based in San Francisco, separated by less than a mile—but the growing tension between social platforms and AI developers is drawing global attention to the legal and ethical boundaries of data use in the AI era.

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