Reddit sues Anthropic over secretive Claude AI training without consent
In a significant development, social media platform Reddit has filed a lawsuit against AI company Anthropic, alleging that the latter used Reddit content without authorization to train its Claude chatbot. The lawsuit, filed on June 4, 2025, in San Francisco Superior Court, seeks specific performance, compensatory damages, disgorgement of profits, and injunctive relief.
The lawsuit centres on five legal claims: breach of contract, unjust enrichment, trespass to chattels, tortious interference, and unfair competition under California law. According to the complaint, Anthropic has been training Claude on Reddit data since December 2021, using content from prominent subreddits including r/explainlikeimfive, r/WritingPrompts, and r/AskHistorians.
The lawsuit aligns with the 2023 Joint Statement on Data Scraping from multiple countries, which called for social media platforms to prevent unauthorized scraping due to privacy risks. Without formal agreements, Reddit cannot ensure third parties respect user deletion requests or avoid prohibited content categories like sexually explicit material.
The financial implications extend beyond Reddit to Anthropic's commercial partnerships, with Amazon having invested approximately $8 billion in Anthropic since 2023. Anthropic uses Claude to power its revamped Alexa assistant and AWS cloud services.
Anthropic's public statements add complexity to the dispute. An Anthropic spokesperson claimed that Reddit had been on their block list for web crawling since mid-May 2024. However, Reddit's audit logs contradicted this assertion, showing Anthropic bots accessed the platform more than 100,000 times in subsequent months through ClaudeBot and other automated systems.
Legal experts note the case could establish important precedents for AI training data rights. The outcome may have significant implications for user privacy rights and licensing revenue in the social media and AI industries.
The case highlights fundamental tensions between social media platforms and AI companies over data usage rights. Reddit argues that commercial actors cannot appropriate platform content to create 'billion-dollar enterprises' without compensation or user protection.
Anthropic has not yet filed a formal response to the lawsuit. Meanwhile, the lawsuit proceeds as Anthropic continues expanding Claude's capabilities, including browser integration features currently in research preview.
Interestingly, legal experts have observed the unusual legal positioning in this case. Quinn Emanuel is representing both Perplexity and Anthropic in separate cases, making Quinn 'the first lawyer to act on both sides of the publisher/platform v developer wars in the US courts.'
The lawsuit may influence whether social media platforms can successfully require licensing agreements from AI companies accessing their content for model training purposes. Cloudflare research shows Anthropic maintains among the most extreme extraction ratios in the industry, with ClaudeBot crawling 38,000 pages for every referred page visit in July 2025.
The case underscores the need for clear guidelines and regulations regarding AI training data rights and the use of user-generated content. As the use of AI continues to grow, so too does the importance of protecting user privacy and ensuring fair compensation for content creators.
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