Reddit has taken legal action against AI startup Anthropic, accusing the company of using Reddit’s content to train its artificial intelligence models without permission. The lawsuit, filed in a Northern California court, claims Anthropic accessed Reddit data for commercial purposes in violation of the platform’s user agreement. This makes Reddit the first major technology firm to challenge an AI company in court over data usage, following similar actions by publishers and artists against tech firms for allegedly misusing their content.
This case follows a pattern that is quickly becoming familiar. The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft over training their models on news articles without authorisation, while authors such as Sarah Silverman and musicians have launched lawsuits against Meta and other AI firms for using their work to develop generative models. At the heart of these complaints is a growing concern that creative and user-generated content is being scraped without consent or compensation.
Reddit, however, has chosen to license its data to some companies under specific conditions. The platform has existing agreements with OpenAI and Google, allowing them to use Reddit posts to train their AI systems, on the condition that user privacy and content integrity are protected. In contrast, Reddit alleges that Anthropic not only scraped data without a deal in place but also ignored clear warnings to stop. According to the lawsuit, Anthropic’s bots continued to access Reddit more than 100,000 times even after saying it had ceased the activity.
The legal complaint further claims that Anthropic bypassed Reddit’s robots.txt file, a widely recognised method used by websites to signal that automated bots should not crawl their content. Reddit argues that this disregard for web protocols and the company’s outreach amounts to a serious breach. Reddit is now seeking financial compensation and a legal order to stop Anthropic from using any of its content going forward.
Anthropic has denied the claims and says it will fight the lawsuit. The case highlights the increasingly tense relationship between AI developers and content platforms, especially as AI becomes more powerful and the data it relies on becomes more valuable. Reddit’s move signals that tech companies, not just artists or publishers, are now prepared to challenge how AI models are being built and monetised.
