Reddit has initiated legal proceedings against Anthropic — the AI startup founded by former OpenAI senior leaders — alleging unauthorized use of Reddit’s user-generated content to train Anthropic’s AI models, including its chatbot, Claude. The lawsuit, filed in the California Superior Court on June 4, 2025, accuses Anthropic of breaching Reddit’s terms of service and engaging in unfair competition by scraping Reddit’s data without permission.
According to Reddit, the San Francisco-based AI startup accessed its platform over 100,000 times since July 2024, despite public claims that its bots had been blocked. Actually, in its complaint, the online community platform accused Anthropic of bypassing its robots.txt file (a standard used to tell bots not to access certain parts of a website) by allowing its scraper bots to crawl Reddit despite those restrictions.
The company contends that Anthropic’s actions contradict its public assurances and violate Reddit’s user agreement, which prohibits commercial exploitation of user content without a formal licensing agreement. While Reddit has already established licensing agreements with companies like Google and OpenAI, Anthropic allegedly refused to enter into such agreements, even as it benefited from Reddit’s content.
In its court submission, Reddit highlights the value of its human-generated discussions and their significance in training AI models like Anthropic’s Claude. The company claims that Anthropic’s use of its content could be worth billions and is seeking unspecified reimbursement, punitive damages, and an injunction to prevent Anthropic from using Reddit data for commercial purposes.
This is not the first time Anthropic has faced legal action over its data practices. Earlier in August 2024, a class-action lawsuit was filed against the company by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson. They allege that Anthropic used unauthorized, pirated copies of their published works to train its AI chatbot, Claude, without providing any compensation. The case adds to a growing list of similar lawsuits targeting other major AI firms, including OpenAI and Meta, over the unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train AI models.
However, Anthropic’s related controversies are not just limited to copyright issues. The AI upstart has also faced allegations of pushing against AI regulations and accepting substantial investments from tech giants like Amazon and Google, raising antitrust concerns. Notably, Anthropic has so far raised around $14.3 billion, including $8 billion from Amazon and over $3 billion from Google. Meanwhile, some recent reports suggest that the AI startup is generating around $3 billion in annualized revenue. This latest estimate (based on the company’s current sales pace projected over a full year) has tripled since December 2024.
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