Reddit Sues Anthropic Over AI Data Scraping, Demands Claude Be Pulled From Market

Reddit is taking Anthropic to court, accusing the AI company of illegally using Reddit users’ content to train its AI models without permission or compensation. The lawsuit, filed by Reddit in the U.S., alleges that Anthropic’s Claude models were trained on massive amounts of Reddit data scraped over the years—despite clear terms in Reddit’s user agreement that prohibit such use without a licensing deal.

At the center of the complaint is the claim that Anthropic bypassed Reddit’s rules, scraping vast amounts of posts and conversations to improve Claude AI, a commercial product. According to Reddit, this wasn't a one-time mistake but an ongoing issue—even after Anthropic publicly claimed in mid-2024 that it had stopped crawling the platform. Reddit alleges its logs tell a different story: over 100,000 attempted accesses by Anthropic’s bots in the months following that announcement.

Reddit’s legal challenge is not just about copyright or server costs—it’s also about user privacy and control. When Redditors delete posts, there’s an expectation that their content disappears from all systems, including any third-party tools or platforms that may have accessed it. Reddit has licensing agreements with other AI firms like OpenAI and Google that honor this principle. According to the lawsuit, Anthropic has no such deal and has refused to negotiate one, meaning deleted Reddit content could still live on inside Claude’s training data.

The lawsuit even points to a troubling admission from Claude itself: when asked about Reddit content, the AI allegedly acknowledged it has no way to confirm whether the posts it was trained on were later deleted. Reddit argues this undermines not just copyright protections but user autonomy over personal data.

Reddit isn’t only seeking damages for lost licensing fees and increased server usage—it’s asking the court for a sweeping injunction. If granted, it would bar Anthropic from using Reddit data entirely and block the sale or licensing of any AI product trained on that data. That could mean pulling Claude from the market entirely, or at minimum, forcing a major retraining effort.

This case adds fuel to a growing debate over data ownership in the AI age. While much of the internet is publicly accessible, Reddit argues that doesn’t make its content fair game for commercial exploitation. The platform is drawing a line, saying companies must ask—and pay—for the right to use community-generated content, especially when building billion-dollar technologies.