Reddit v. Anthropic: A New Wave of Lawsuits Against AI Giants
On June 4, 2025, Reddit Inc., the owner of the world’s largest online forum with numerous communities (subreddits), filed a lawsuit in the San Francisco Superior Court against the owner of the well-known AI agent, Claude (Anthropic, PBC).
Anthropic is accused of repeatedly scraping content from Reddit resources, despite Anthropic’s prior public statements in the summer of 2024 about preventing web crawling from Reddit’s resources. To add some spice to the opening statement of their lawsuit, Reddit's lawyers (Quinn Emanuel) asked Claude itself, "Were you trained, at least in part, on Reddit data?", to which they received a direct response: "Yes" and they used this as evidence against Claude.
In its complaint, Reddit asks the court to:
- an injunction prohibiting Anthropic from using data from Reddit resources in any way, including for the purpose of training Claude and other AI products;
- an injunction prohibiting Anthropic from continuing to license and sell Claude and other AI products that incorporate data or were trained using Reddit data;
- seek damages from Anthropic (unjust enrichment, compensatory damages, lost profits, and punitive damages).
Reddit’s lawyers present the following main groups of arguments in the lawsuit:
- Breach of Contract - breach of Reddit’s User Agreement and Privacy Policy, as content scraping for commercial purposes is expressly prohibited by the platform's terms of use, which was accepted by and, thus, applies to Anthropic and its AI bots;
- Unjust Enrichment - Reddit seeks reimbursement for the value of the benefit received unlawfully from the content that Anthropic used to train its AI models;
- Trespass to Chattels - Reddit claims that the illegal scraping by Anthropic damaged the company's technological infrastructure, reducing server capabilities and degrading platform performance, including security and privacy implications;
- Unfair Competition - in the form of infringement on Reddit’s property and interference with contractual relationships between Reddit and its users, as well as misleading public statements.
It is worth noting that, unlike many cases in the AI battlefield, such as Bartz v. Anthropic , where the primary focus is on copyright violations in AI training and fair use doctrine, this dispute mainly centers on the breach of contract (User Agreement) and confidentiality of communications, as well as the overall nature of business conduct in this sector. Reddit is trying to address the "ethics" and fairness of scraping itself, emphasizing that Anthropic’s AI models are in fact different from what the company claims in its marketing materials and public statements.
In the CIS region, in 2021-2022 lawyers focused their attention on the VKontakte v. Double Data case, which also addressed the legality of scraping / parsing data from the social network vk.com. While issues regarding exclusive rights to the database have been somewhat resolved (in short, it was illegal), albeit in the haze of a settlement, the issue of using users' personal data, which is made public by the users themselves, is far from being resolved. However, it was against this context that a new Article 10.1 was introduced to Federal Law No. 152-FZ “On Personal Data” in Russia, which still sparks debates and discussions on when it is permissible to scrape / parse data from websites and social networks.
We advise our readers and clients to follow developments on this topic, especially those involved in the creation and training of AI models.
Authors: Kamal Tserakhau, Aliaksandr Struzhko
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