Anthropic is facing a lawsuit from Reddit, the first major tech company to take legal action against the AI startup. Reddit accuses the company of scraping posts from its site without permission to train Claude, Anthropic’s generative AI chatbot.
The complaint, filed June 4 in San Francisco County, argues that Anthropic violated Reddit’s user agreement by commercially exploiting its data without a licensing deal.
Anthropic allegedly ignored Reddit’s terms
Reddit’s terms of service prohibit the commercial use of its content without express agreement. The lawsuit claims that while OpenAI and Google have formal licensing partnerships, Anthropic used Reddit’s data despite knowing such use wasn’t permitted.
“The unauthorized commercial use of Reddit content harms Reddit, which has established a market for licensing content, through which Reddit imposes meaningful guardrails on the use of such content to protect both Reddit and its users,” the suit states.
This sets the case apart from previous AI-related lawsuits, many of which hinge on issues related to copyright law. Reddit is arguing breach of contract, not copyright infringement.
Music publishers settled parts of earlier lawsuit
Earlier this year, Anthropic reached a partial settlement with several major music publishers who had sued the company for distributing copyrighted lyrics through its chatbot.
Although the publishers — Universal Music Group, Concord Music Group, and ABKCO — claimed that Anthropic undermined the existing licensing market, a U.S. district judge ruled in March that they hadn’t proven that point.
Despite the ruling, the publishers told The Hollywood Reporter they remain “very confident” in their broader case against the company.
Authors accuse Anthropic of using pirated books
In a separate class-action lawsuit filed in August 2024, authors such as Andrea Bartz and Kirk Wallace Johnson accused Anthropic of training Claude using pirated copies of their books.
Anthropic asked a California federal court to dismiss the case in March, according to Reuters. The company argued that it used the books under fair use laws, transforming the original content into something new.
