Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, an AI company backed by Amazon and known for its chatbot Claude, alleging unauthorized and extensive access to its platform. Filed in San Francisco Superior Court, the complaint claims that Anthropic scraped Reddit’s content more than 100,000 times since July 2024, despite previously asserting that its bots were blocked from doing so.
Reddit characterized Anthropic as presenting a misleading public image. “This case is about the two faces of Anthropic,” the filing states, accusing the company of publicly claiming to respect legal and ethical boundaries while privately bypassing them to fuel its AI development. The lawsuit reflects growing tensions between AI companies and data-rich platforms over how content is sourced for training large language models.
Anthropic has not yet issued a public response to the lawsuit.
Valuable Data and Strategic Partnerships at Stake
Reddit’s chief legal officer, Ben Lee, criticized Anthropic’s use of Reddit data, suggesting it could be worth billions in AI model training. He emphasized Reddit’s unique role in hosting authentic human conversations across nearly two decades, which are increasingly sought after in an AI-saturated digital world. “Reddit’s humanity is uniquely valuable in a world flattened by AI,” said Lee in a statement to The Verge.
In contrast to the alleged unauthorized scraping by Anthropic, Reddit has entered into a legitimate data-sharing agreement with Google, announced in February 2024. That deal, reportedly worth around $60 million annually, underscores the financial value Reddit places on its content when used to train AI systems. Reddit has emphasized that its discussions, created by real users over time, are not only distinctive but central to the advancement of large language models.
Anthropic Faces Growing Legal Scrutiny
This is not Anthropic’s first brush with legal controversy. The company is already facing multiple lawsuits related to copyright infringement. In August 2023, a group of authors filed a class-action suit against the firm, accusing it of building its AI models on the foundation of “hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.” In another case, Universal Music filed a lawsuit in Tennessee, citing widespread unauthorized use of copyrighted lyrics by Anthropic.
These lawsuits form part of a broader wave of legal actions from content creators, publishers, and media companies targeting AI firms over how data is acquired and used. Other major players such as OpenAI have also come under fire. The New York Times, George R.R. Martin, and several newspaper publishers have filed high-profile lawsuits challenging the legality of AI training practices. Meanwhile, Cohere, another AI startup, is being sued by a consortium of publishers, including Vox Media, over similar issues.
Reddit’s lawsuit against Anthropic marks another significant development in the growing conflict between platforms rich in user-generated content and AI companies racing to build smarter, more capable language models often without clear boundaries on how data should be ethically sourced and compensated.
