Reddit is suing Anthropic for allegedly hoovering up the site's user data without permission, marking another flashpoint in the increasingly heated battle over how AI companies should pay for the human conversations that power their models.
Key Points:
- Reddit claims Anthropic accessed its servers over 100,000 times after promising to stop scraping
- The lawsuit alleges Anthropic used Reddit data commercially without paying licensing fees like OpenAI and Google do
- Reddit argues this contradicts Anthropic's positioning as the "white knight of the AI industry"
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in California, accuses Anthropic of flouting Reddit's data policies and continuing to scrape the platform even after the AI company claimed it had blocked its bots from accessing the site. Reddit says Anthropic "intentionally trained on the personal data of Reddit users without ever requesting their consent."
Chris McKay
It's a particularly pointed accusation given how Anthropic markets itself. The company has built much of its brand around being more responsible than competitors like OpenAI, emphasizing AI safety and constitutional training methods. Reddit's complaint specifically calls out this positioning, saying Anthropic's alleged conduct runs counter to how it "bills itself as the white knight of the AI industry."
The timing couldn't be more awkward for Anthropic, which recently released Claude Opus 4 to strong reviews and has been gaining ground against OpenAI's GPT models. Reddit data is considered especially valuable for AI training because it captures authentic human conversations across thousands of topics—something that's reflected in a 2021 Anthropic research paper the lawsuit references.
Chris McKay
Reddit has been aggressive about monetizing its trove of user discussions, striking lucrative licensing deals with both OpenAI and Google. The company implemented new restrictions on data scraping last year, creating a public content policy and updating its backend code to limit unauthorized access.
But according to Reddit, Anthropic kept coming back for more. The complaint alleges that despite assurances the company had stopped scraping, "Anthropic's bots continued to hit Reddit's servers over one hundred thousand times."
Anthropic didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. The lawsuit represents yet another front in the broader legal war over AI training data, as platforms that host valuable human-generated content increasingly demand compensation from the companies building billion-dollar models on top of it.
For Reddit, which went public last year and is under pressure to show how it can turn its massive user base into sustainable revenue, these licensing deals represent a crucial new income stream. The question now is whether the courts will force reluctant AI companies to pay up—or let them keep scraping for free.