Reddit had filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging that the AI company behind the Claude chatbot has been using its data for years without permission. The lawsuit comes after Reedit has increasingly taken a hardline stance against scrapers and companies that use its data to train AI models.
In their filing, Reddit alleges that Anthropic was training its Claude chatbot on Reddit data as early as December 2021. The lawsuit also includes a screenshot in which Claude seems to acknowledge it was trained on Reddit data. In a statement to Tech Reader, a Reddit spokesperson said the lawsuit was the company’s “final option to force Anthropic to stop its unlawful practices” after repeated warnings.
“We believe in the Open Internet—that does not give Anthropic the right to scrape Reddit content unlawfully, exploit it for billions of dollars in profit, and disregard the rights and privacy of our users,” the spokesperson said. “In clear violation of Reddit’s terms and despite repeated requests to stop, Anthropic has been caught accessing or attempting to access Reddit content via automated bots at least 100,000 times. This isn’t a misunderstanding, it’s a sustained effort to extract value from Reddit while ignoring legal and ethical boundaries.”
Reddit’s vast archive of online discussions has become a particularly valuable commodity for the company as generative AI companies race to train new models. The company has struck lucrative licensing deals with companies like Google and OpenAI for access to its data. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has previously called out Anthropic (along with other AI firms) for scraping Reddit. Last year, the company took steps to limit automated scraping and warned AI companies that they would need to pay up.
In their lawsuit, Reddit says that “Anthropic refused to engage” in discussions about licensing. “Unlike its competitors, Anthropic has refused to agree to respect Reddit users’ basic privacy rights, including removing deleted posts from its systems,” it says. “This case is about the two faces of Anthropic: the public face that attempts to ingratiate itself into the consumer’s consciousness with claims of righteousness and respect for boundaries and the law, and the private face that ignores any rules that interfere with its attempts to further line its pockets.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for Anthropic said, “we disagree with Reddit’s claims and will defend ourselves vigorously.”
Update, June 4, 2025 12:03 PM ET: This post was updated to include a statement from Anthropic.
