Reddit sued artificial intelligence company Anthropic on Wednesday, accusing it of using Reddit content without permission to train its AI models.
The complaint was filed in San Francisco Superior Court.
Reddit said Anthropic trained its Claude chatbot on Reddit data without a license, despite earlier assurances that it had blocked its bots from accessing the platform. The lawsuit said Anthropic’s bots accessed or attempted to access Reddit content more than 100,000 times.
Reddit also cited Claude admitting it had been trained on at least some Reddit data and did not know if the content was deleted.
The company said Anthropic has refused to enter into a licensing agreement, unlike other AI companies such as Google and OpenAI. Reddit claimed that by using the scraped content for commercial purposes, Anthropic violated its user policy and gained financial benefits worth tens of billions of dollars.
Anthropic, whose backers include Amazon and Alphabet, said it disagrees with Reddit’s claims and will defend itself.
Reddit’s Chief Legal Officer Ben Lee said the company supports an open internet but believes AI companies need clear limits on how they use scraped content.
Both Reddit and Anthropic are based in San Francisco, located about 10 minutes apart.
Reddit is seeking unspecified damages and a court order to stop Anthropic from using its content for commercial use. The lawsuit follows the launch of Anthropic’s newest Claude models, Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, introduced on May 22. Two people familiar with the matter said Anthropic’s annualized revenue has reached $3 billion.
