Reddit has filed a lawsuit against AI startup Anthropic, accusing the company of illegally using Reddit content to train its artificial intelligence models, despite previous assurances that it would not. The suit, lodged Wednesday in San Francisco Superior Court, escalates the growing legal clashes between tech platforms and AI firms over data rights.
According to the complaint, Anthropic used Reddit data without permission to develop its Claude AI models, including its most recent iterations, Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, launched in May. Reddit alleges that Anthropic refused to enter a licensing agreement and scraped Reddit content more than 100,000 times, directly violating its user policies.
The filing cites Claude itself admitting it was trained on “at least some Reddit data” and acknowledging uncertainty about whether the content used had since been deleted. Reddit emphasized that this undermines Anthropic’s self-styled image as a trustworthy and ethical AI company.
“Anthropic refuses to respect Reddit’s guardrails and enter into a license agreement, unlike Google and OpenAI,” the lawsuit states. Reddit claims the company has enriched itself by “tens of billions of dollars” through commercial exploitation of scraped content.
In response, an Anthropic spokesperson said, “We disagree with Reddit’s claims and will defend ourselves vigorously.”
Reddit Chief Legal Officer Ben Lee commented, “We believe in an open internet, but AI companies need clear limitations on how they use content they scrape.”
Both companies are headquartered in San Francisco, just minutes from one another. The lawsuit seeks an injunction to prevent Anthropic from further using Reddit content for commercial purposes, as well as unspecified restitution and punitive damages.
The case is Reddit Inc v. Anthropic PBC, California Superior Court, San Francisco County, No. CGC-25-524892.
Written By Rodney Mbua
