Filed in the Northern California Court on 4 June 2025, Reddit’s 42-page complaint comes as the latest battle over AI companies’ reported authorised use of third-party content.
Reddit claimed that Anthropic, which is backed by Amazon and Google parent Alphabet, broke its user agreement by leveraging data from its website for commercial purposes. Allegedly, Anthropic has been training its AI models on posts made by Reddit users without receiving their consent.
Additionally, as detailed in the complaint, Anthropic has decided against entering a licensing agreement even as it trained its Claude chatbot on Reddit content, even if in July 2024, the company guaranteed that it had blocked its bots from accessing the social media discussion website. However, Reddit quoted the Claude chatbot admitting it was trained on at least some Reddit data and did not have any information if that content was, in fact, deleted.
Moreover, Reddit mentioned that Anthropic’s bots have accessed or tried to do so on its content over 100,000 times. The complaint underlined that Anthropic denied to respect Reddit guidelines and enter into a licence agreement, compared to Google and OpenAI, which accepted this requirement. By gathering content and leveraging it for commercial purposes, Anthropic violated Reddit’s user policy and advanced its operations, as detailed in the complaint.
Commenting on the decision, representatives from Reddit highlighted that, even if their company believes in an open internet, AI companies need clear limitations on how they leverage the content they scrape. According to Reuters, Anthropic disagrees with Reddit’s claims, planning to defend the company strongly.
Reddit’s lawsuit against Anthropic demands unspecified restitution and punitive damages, as well as an order prohibiting the latter from utilising its content for commercial purposes.
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