Reddit sues AI company Anthropic for allegedly 'scraping' user comments
to train chatbot Claude
[June 05, 2025] By
MATT O'BRIEN
Social media platform Reddit sued the artificial intelligence company
Anthropic on Wednesday, alleging that it is illegally "scraping" the
comments of millions of Reddit users to train its chatbot Claude.
Reddit claims that Anthropic has used automated bots to access Reddit's
content despite being asked not to do so, and “intentionally trained on
the personal data of Reddit users without ever requesting their
consent.”
Anthropic said in a statement that it disagreed with Reddit’s claims
"and will defend ourselves vigorously.”
Reddit filed the lawsuit Wednesday in California Superior Court in San
Francisco, where both companies are based.
“AI companies should not be allowed to scrape information and content
from people without clear limitations on how they can use that data,”
said Ben Lee, Reddit's chief legal officer, in a statement Wednesday.
Reddit has previously entered licensing agreements with Google, OpenAI
and other companies that are paying to be able to train their AI systems
on the public commentary of Reddit's more than 100 million daily users.
Those 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,” Lee said.
The licensing deals also helped the 20-year-old online platform raise
money ahead of its Wall Street debut as a publicly traded company last
year.
Anthropic was formed by former OpenAI executives in 2021 and its
flagship Claude chatbot remains a key competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT.
While OpenAI has close ties to Microsoft, Anthropic's primary commercial
partner is Amazon, which is using Claude to improve its widely used
Alexa voice assistant.
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Reddit Inc. signage is seen on the New York Stock Exchange trading
floor, prior to Reddit IPO, Thursday, March. 21, 2024. v(AP
Photo/Yuki Iwamura, File)
 Much like other AI companies,
Anthropic has relied heavily on websites such as Wikipedia and
Reddit that are deep troves of written materials that can help teach
an AI assistant the patterns of human language.
In a 2021 paper co-authored by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei — cited in
the lawsuit — researchers at the company identified the subreddits,
or subject-matter forums, that contained the highest quality AI
training data, such as those focused on gardening, history,
relationship advice or thoughts people have in the shower.
Anthropic in 2023 argued in a letter to the U.S. Copyright Office
that the "way Claude was trained qualifies as a quintessentially
lawful use of materials,” by making copies of information to perform
a statistical analysis of a large body of data. It is already
battling a lawsuit from major music publishers alleging that Claude
regurgitates the lyrics of copyrighted songs.
But Reddit's lawsuit is different from others brought against AI
companies because it doesn’t allege copyright infringement. Instead,
it focuses on the alleged breach of Reddit's terms of use, and the
unfair competition, it says, was created.
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