Social media platform Reddit has filed a lawsuit against AI startup Anthropic, accusing it of unauthorized data scraping to train its Claude chatbot.
In its Wednesday filing in San Francisco Superior Court, Reddit alleged that Anthropic accessed its platform more than 100,000 times after July 2024, despite having publicly announced that it had halted such activity.
The filing accuses Anthropic of violating Reddit’s user agreement, scraping content without consent, and continuing to use the platform’s data to train its large language models.
In the complaint, Reddit described Anthropic as a “late-blooming” AI company that presents a public image of responsibility while allegedly operating in violation of rules and boundaries.
“This case is about the two faces of Anthropic,” the lawsuit reads, accusing the company of “commercial exploitation” of Reddit’s content for profit.
Speaking to The Verge, Reddit’s chief legal officer, Ben Lee, argued that no other platform hosts the breadth of authentic conversation that Reddit does, and that this trove, spanning decades, reportedly holds a multibillion-dollar value in the AI training race.
“Now more than ever, people are seeking authentic human-to-human conversation. Reddit hosts nearly 20 years of rich, human discussion on virtually every topic imaginable. These conversations don’t happen anywhere else—and they’re central to training language models like Claude,” Lee said.
Reddit has licensed its data to AI companies, including a $60 million-per-year deal signed with Google in early 2024. The platform has also partnered with firms such as OpenAI, Sprinklr, and Cision for similar data access agreements.
As such, the lawsuit seeks damages, restitution, and a permanent injunction barring Anthropic from using Reddit-derived data in any of its products. It also requests that the court prohibit the company from licensing or profiting off any AI models trained on Reddit content.
Legal tensions over AI training data are mounting across the media landscape. In one high-profile case, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, accusing them of using its reporting without consent. More recently, Vox Media and Condé Nast joined a lawsuit against AI firm Cohere for similar claims of copyright infringement.
Mounting lawsuits like Reddit’s have amplified calls for stronger user rights in the digital economy. Critics argue that centralized platforms continue to extract value from user-generated content while giving little back in return.
Decentralized social networks, such as Lens Protocol and Farcaster, have emerged as alternatives, offering blockchain-based models where users own their data and earn from its use.
Meanwhile, platforms like Bittensor and Ocean Protocol are building decentralised infrastructures where users can contribute data or AI models in exchange for on-chain rewards.
