Reddit has reportedly sued AI company Anthropic, alleging the unauthorized use of its data to train AI models. According to the lawsuit filed in San Francisco superior court, Anthropic had accessed Reddit more than 100,000 times since July 2024, after Anthropic allegedly said it had blocked its bots from doing so. In the filing, Reddit calls Anthropic a “late-blooming artificial intelligence (‘AI’) company that bills itself as the white knight of the AI industry,” alleging that “it is anything but.”
“This case is about the two faces of Anthropic: the public face that attempts to ingratiate itself into the consumer’s consciousness with claims of righteousness and respect for boundaries and the law, and the private face that ignores any rules that interfere with its attempts to further line its pockets,” Reddit said.
READ: Windsurf alleges Anthropic is restricting direct access to Claude AI models (June 5, 2025)
Reddit’s chief legal officer Ben Lee told The Verge that Anthropic’s “commercial exploitation” of Reddit content could be worth billions of dollars. “Reddit’s humanity is uniquely valuable in a world flattened by AI,” Lee said. “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.”
This is not the first time Anthropic has come under fire for misuse of data and copyright infringement. In August 2024, three authors filed a class-action lawsuit in California federal court against Anthropic, alleging in a filing that the company had “built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.” And in October 2023, Universal Music sued Anthropic in a Tennessee federal court over “systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics.”
A growing number of publishers and content creators are suing AI companies in general for copyright infringement. OpenAI has been through a high-profile lawsuit from The New York Times, a class-action lawsuit from a group of authors including George R.R. Martin, and a lawsuit from the publishers of newspapers including The New York Daily News and The Chicago Tribune. A group of publishers including Condé Nast and Vox Media has sued AI company Cohere for infringement.
Reddit has played an important role in this conversation since the generative AI boom that began with OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. Reddit’s website is filled with user-generated information about hundreds of thousands of topics and has been a main source of training for large AI models including Anthropic’s Claude.
Reddit had also announced a partnership with OpenAI in May, which will allow the company to train its AI models on Reddit content. The company also has a similar agreement with Google.
Reddit said in the lawsuit that other AI giants “understand and respect Reddit’s rules.” It named OpenAI and Google as companies that “are permitted to use public Reddit content but only after agreeing to Reddit’s licensing terms,” protecting user privacy. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is a former board member and major shareholder in Reddit with a stake now worth well over $1 billion.