AI developer Anthropic states Reddit’s lawsuit against it implicates federal copyright law, and so should be tried in a federal court. This is in response to Reddit’s motion to send the action back to state court from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Reddit’s allegation that Anthropic scraped the platform’s user posts to train its large language model is a “quintessential” copyright claim—but because Reddit doesn’t own the copyrights to user content, it “artfully plead its copyright-like claims in contract and tort,” Anthropic wrote on Tuesday. “These mere labels do not and cannot change the gravamen of Reddit’s suit or the proper forum for it,” the company added.
READ: Anthropic cofounders warn about AI replacing human jobs ‘exponentially’ (
Reddit had sued Anthropic in June, alleging the unauthorized use of its data to train AI models. According to the lawsuit, Anthropic had accessed Reddit more than 100,000 times since July 2024, after it 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.”
“Reddit wants to avoid a pure copyright fight because those claims are harder to prove,” Vivek Jayaram, an intellectual property attorney, said. “State law gives them more levers to protect their data.”
Earlier this month, Reddit insisted its claims aren’t completely preempted by U.S. copyright law because each of them contains an extra element that isn’t required for a copyright claim.
Anthropic responded saying there’s “no qualitative difference” between copyright claims and Reddit’s state law claims. Although Reddit said complete preemption is “rare,” Anthropic said several courts including California’s Northern District have found such claims “completely preempted where they do not implicate rights that are qualitatively different from those protected by the Copyright Act.”
READ: Reddit sues Anthropic for data misuse (
“This case isn’t about copyright at all,” a Reddit spokesperson said, according to a Bloomberg Law report. “Anthropic is claiming that (and attempting to mischaracterize our complaint) to distract from their misconduct and the point of this lawsuit: Anthropic is mistaken if it thinks it can breach Reddit’s terms and ignore our users’ privacy rights with impunity.” Meanwhile, Adam Eisgrau, senior director of AI and creativity at the Big Tech-backed Chamber of Progress, said Anthropic was right to remove the case and that the court would be “right to keep it there just long enough to dismiss it.”
“Reddit’s transparent attempt to sue Anthropic for copyright infringement by dressing up that exclusively federal action as a brace of state claims remains an inartful dodge that’s wasting the court’s time and resources,” he said.