Reddit Sues Anthropic for Scrapping Content Without Permission

Social media platform Reddit has filed a lawsuit against AI giant Anthropic, alleging that the AI company used content from millions of its forums to train its large language model (LLM) without the social platform’s permission.

Reddit filed the complaint on June 6 in San Francisco (US), where both companies are based.

According to the complaint, Anthropic refused to enter an agreement with Reddit while training its Claude chatbot on Reddit’s data. The AI company claimed to have blocked its bots from accessing Reddit’s data since July 2024, though it’s unclear if Anthropic has deleted the used content.

“We will not tolerate profit-seeking entities like Anthropic commercially exploiting Reddit content for billions of dollars without any return for redditors or respect for their privacy,” said Reddit’s chief legal officer, Ben Lee, to tech news outlet TechCrunch.

Other AI companies have been sued in the past over their use of copyrighted content for training, such as the case in December of last year when five Canadian news companies sued OpenAI. However, unlike similar cases brought in the past, Reddit’s complaint isn’t based on copyright law, but on a breach of Reddit’s terms of use.

The social media site has previously entered agreements with Google and OpenAI to train other LLMs.

According to Lee, the agreements “enable us to enforce meaningful protections for our users, including the right to delete your content, user privacy protections, and preventing users from being spammed using this content.”

According to the lawsuit, Anthropic has accessed the platform over 100,000 times since July 2024, after it had been explicitly prohibited from doing so. Reddit also argues that Anthropic had to deliberately bypass its robots.txt files, which would otherwise signal systems not to crawl websites.

The lawsuit seeks restitution and punitive damages, as well as an injunction order to prohibit Anthropic from accessing Reddit again.

“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,” reads the official filing.

In response, Anthropic spokesperson Danielle Ghinghlieri told outlets: “We disagree with Reddit’s claims and will defend ourselves vigorously.”