Reddit Inc. has filed a lawsuit against Anthropic PBC that accuses the artificial intelligence startup of unauthorized scraping and commercial use of Reddit user data to train its Claude family of AI models.

The complaint, filed today in the Superior Court of California, San Francisco, alleges breach of contract, trespass to chattels, unjust enrichment, tortious interference and unfair competition.

Reddit’s case portrays Anthropic as a company that has ignored Reddit’s technological safeguards and user privacy protections in pursuit of rapid AI development. Reddit claims that Anthropic accessed the platform without permission more than 100,000 times, even after publicly stating it had stopped and used that data to build and commercialize Claude. Reddit is seeking damages, disgorgement of profits and a court order blocking further use of its data by Anthropic.

Key to Reddit’s case is that it has formal licensing agreements in place with OpenAI, Google LLC and other companies, which include strict content usage and deletion protocols. Reddit’s contracts are designed to honor user privacy, enforce content deletion and support the infrastructure costs associated with access.

According to the filing, Anthropic refused to enter into a similar agreement, continuing to scrape Reddit data in violation of the platform’s user agreement and robots.txt protections. The lawsuit describes the conduct as not only unlawful but deceptive, referencing multiple public statements from Anthropic claiming it respects scraping directives and user privacy.

“For its part, despite what its marketing material says, Anthropic does not care about Reddit’s rules or users: it believes it is entitled to take whatever content it wants and use that content however it desires, with impunity,” the lawsuit states. “Anthropic is in fact intentionally trained on the personal data of Reddit users without ever requesting their consent.”

As noted by the Wall Street Journal, the lawsuit also references a 2021 Anthropic research paper that details the usefulness of Reddit data in AI model training.

The lawsuit isn’t the first against AI companies allegedly scraping and using data from other sites without permission. Other notable lawsuits included The New York Times Co. vs. OpenAI and Microsoft Corp., filed in December 2023 and Getty Images vs. Stability AI in February 2023.

Investors liked the news that Reddit was suing Anthropic. Reddit stock closed regular trading today up almost 67% to $118.21.

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