Reddit sues Anthropic over AI content scraping • The Register

Reddit, the popular internet discussion forum, sued Anthropic on Wednesday, alleging that the AI biz scraped content generated by its users in violation of contractual terms and technical barriers.

The complaint [PDF], filed in San Francisco Superior Court on Wednesday, claims Anthropic’s use of scraper bots to collect Reddit violates the site’s User Agreement and represents unfair competition under California law.

While other AI giants have entered into licensing agreements and respect users’ choice, Anthropic has not

“Anthropic is a late-blooming artificial intelligence (‘AI’) company that bills itself as the white knight of the AI industry,” the complaint says. “It is anything but. Anthropic says – often and loudly – that it ‘prioritize[s] honesty’ and is guided by ‘unusually high trust.’ These claims are empty marketing gimmicks.”

The legal filing argues that Anthropic has intentionally trained its models on the personal data of Reddit users without requesting consent. It also contends that Anthropic’s 2024 claim to have restrained its content harvesting crawlers after receiving complaints was disingenuous.

In July 2024, repair community site iFixit said Anthropic crawlers had visited the site more than a million times in a single day.

At the time, website publishers were becoming more hostile to AI crawlers harvesting data and all the major commercial AI model makers were taking steps to ensure that their bots respected instructions that web publishers embed in robots.txt files – the commonly-used means of leaving instructions for how bots should behave when visiting a site.

Bots and their operators are not technically or legally obligated to follow said directives, but publishers can cite non-compliant crawlers to support claims of wrongdoing.

Anthropic at the time offered assurances that its ClaudeBot would abide by site visitation restrictions. The Reddit lawsuit claims the AI biz hasn’t done so, though it does not cite examples of alleged robots.txt violations by Anthropic after July 2024.

But other companies, such as Vercel and Sourcehut, have complained of improper crawling from unnamed bots since that time.

In May 2024, Reddit signed a content licensing deal with OpenAI to include Reddit content in the corpus it uses to make AI models. Although the forum site concluded that deal a few months after its initial public offering, revenue from content licensing appears to have become an important part of the business plan.

On Reddit’s Q1 2025 earnings conference call [PDF], CEO Steve Huffman said, “I think our early premise was correct, which is any search company, any AI company, needs an ongoing supply of new information, especially new relevant information.”

“So our strategy is still the same, which is let’s do everything. Let’s be open and open for business. Let’s build our own products on top of our own corpus and do our best to make sure the Reddit information is accessible in as many verticals as possible.”

The complaint notes that Reddit has struck content licensing deals with the likes of OpenAI, Google, Sprinklr, and Cision but has been unable to do so with Anthropic.

“Anthropic refused to engage,” the complaint states. “Thus, while other AI giants have entered into licensing agreements and agreed to respect users’ choices (including by deleting posts that Redditors chose to delete), Anthropic has not.”

Reddit’s legal salvo appears not to have brought Anthropic to the bargaining table.

“We disagree with Reddit’s claims and will defend ourselves vigorously,” a company spokesperson told The Register.

Dismissive of Anthropic’s moralizing and unable to close a licensing deal, Reddit has cast itself as the defender of the “Open Internet.”

“We believe in the Open Internet – that does not give Anthropic the right to scrape Reddit content unlawfully, exploit it for billions of dollars in profit, and disregard the rights and privacy of our users,” a Reddit spokesperson told The Register.

“In clear violation of Reddit’s terms and despite repeated requests to stop, Anthropic has been caught accessing or attempting to access Reddit content via automated bots at least 100,000 times. This isn’t a misunderstanding, it’s a sustained effort to extract value from Reddit while ignoring legal and ethical boundaries.

“We’re filing this lawsuit in line with our Public Content Policy and as our final option to force Anthropic to stop its unlawful practices and abide by its claimed values.” ®