Reddit is suing Anthropic over AI training data
The social media platform is accusing it of illegally scraping Reddit’s content to train its models.
For a while now, people have been side-eyeing how AI models are trained.
It’s not exactly a secret that companies feed chatbots massive amounts of online content to help them sound more human, but where that data comes from has always been a bit murky. Publishers, authors, and artists have been doing most of the legal heavy lifting, but now? Big Tech is taking the gloves off.
This week, Reddit filed a lawsuit against AI startup Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, accusing it of illegally scraping Reddit’s content to train its models. According to Reddit’s complaint, Anthropic accessed the platform over 100,000 times since mid-2024, ignoring robots.txt rules (a standard way to tell bots to stay out) and scraping posts without any licensing agreement. And this, Reddit claims, continued even after the company was told to stop.
What makes this clash stand out is that Reddit has already struck lucrative AI licensing deals with OpenAI and Google that reportedly bring in $60 million a year. The platform boasts over 100 million daily users and has accumulated billions of posts and comments over nearly 20 years, making it one of the most human-rich training datasets on the web. Reddit says those deals come with terms that protect user privacy, but Anthropic “refused to engage,” bypassed safeguards, and unfairly profited from the treasure trove of conversations.
Emmanuel Oyedeji
This isn’t a copyright case, interestingly. Reddit is going after Anthropic for breaching its terms of service and engaging in unfair competition, which could set a broader legal precedent for how user data is treated in the AI arms race.
Interestingly, while companies like DeepSeek have also been called out online for suspiciously human-sounding responses (and even accused of training on Gemini data), Anthropic is the one actually getting hauled into court. Reddit’s not just pointing fingers—it’s out for damages and an injunction to stop Claude from using any of its content moving forward.
Whether or not Reddit wins, this lawsuit could be a turning point. If the court sides with the platform, AI companies may soon need more than just web scrapers and disclaimers—they’ll need signed contracts, too.
For now, this isn’t just about Reddit posts. It’s about who gets to own the conversations that power the future of AI.
