Reddit is suing Anthropic over allegations of unauthorized data scraping. The legal action, filed in Northern California, claims Anthropic used Reddit’s data to train its AI models without a licensing agreement.
Reddit asserts this move violated the platform’s user agreement, marking a significant step as it becomes the first major tech company to legally challenge an AI model provider over data practices. This lawsuit follows a trend in the industry, as companies like The New York Times and Sarah Silverman have pursued similar cases against AI firms.
“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,” said Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer. 
Notably, Reddit has partnerships with OpenAI and Google, allowing them to use Reddit data under specific terms meant to protect user interests. Anthropic, however, allegedly refused to engage with Reddit when approached about scraping content.
Reddit claims that Anthropic’s bots ignored the site’s robots.txt files, which signal to automated systems not to crawl sites. Evidence suggests that Claude, Anthropic’s AI chatbot, frequently references Reddit communities.
Reddit is seeking compensatory damages and an injunction to stop Anthropic from continuing to use its content. Anthropic has not yet commented on the lawsuit.
“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,”
— Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer
