Reddit Sues Anthropic For Scraping Platform Over 100,000 Times

Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, accusing it of scraping Reddit’s platform more than 100,000 times since July 2024—even after claiming it had stopped doing so in May.

The complaint, filed Wednesday in San Francisco Superior Court, calls Anthropic “a late-blooming AI company that bills itself as the white knight of the AI industry,” and alleges that “it is anything but.” Reddit argues that Anthropic’s public image of ethical AI development doesn’t match its actions.

“This case is about the two faces of Anthropic,” the filing reads, accusing the company of ignoring the rules to profit from Reddit content. Anthropic has not yet responded to the lawsuit.

Reddit states that Anthropic used its data without a licensing agreement while violating its public content policy, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. The company stated that it attempted to establish a formal agreement with Anthropic but the company refused to accept the deal while OpenAI and Google had already signed paid licensing agreements.

The user data policy of Reddit prohibits the use of deleted posts and comments in licensed content to safeguard user privacy.

In a statement to The Verge, Reddit’s chief legal officer Ben Lee stressed the value of the platform’s user-generated discussions: “Reddit’s humanity is uniquely valuable in a world flattened by AI. Now more than ever, people are seeking authentic human-to-human conversation.”

“Reddit hosts nearly 20 years of rich, human discussion on virtually every topic imaginable,” Lee added. “These conversations don’t happen anywhere else—and they’re central to training language models like Claude.”

The lawsuit follows Reddit’s February 2024 deal with Google to license its data for AI training, reportedly worth $60 million a year. The platform has made it clear it wants companies to pay for access to its content, as reported by The Verge.

Anthropic, which is backed by Amazon, has faced similar legal issues before. It was previously sued by Universal Music and by a group of authors for allegedly using copyrighted content without permission, noted The Verge.

The case highlights a growing wave of legal challenges against AI firms accused of scraping content without compensation or consent.

Additionally, Reddit has also entered the AI race with its own AI product, Reddit Answers, which uses the platform’s massive archive of human conversations to respond to user queries. The lawsuit against Anthropic not only seeks accountability but also reflects the broader competitive struggle to dominate the future of artificial intelligence.

The rush of companies to develop more intelligent models has led to licensing disputes which expose a fundamental struggle for control over AI data and potential dominance in the AI market.