Reddit sues Anthropic for allegedly using user data without consent to train AI models

Reddit has filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in a Northern California court, alleging the AI company used the personal data of Reddit users, including their deleted posts, to train its artificial intelligence models without user consent. In the suit, Reddit claims Anthropic’s actions violated the platform’s user agreement and bypassed its robots.txt protocol, which is designed to prevent automated data scraping of its content.

Reddit also asserts that Anthropic bots continued to access the platform more than 100,000 times, even after Anthropic said in 2024 it had blocked such activity. The company further argues this scraping compromised user privacy, as it involved content users intended to be deleted and no longer accessible.

While Reddit has signed licensing deals with OpenAI that govern data use under explicit privacy terms, it says Anthropic declined to negotiate a similar agreement. Notably, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, owns 8.7% of Reddit and was previously on its board. Anthropic has publicly stated it disagrees with Reddit’s claims and intends to contest the case vigorously. Reddit is seeking compensatory damages, recovery of profits from the scraped data, and a court injunction to prevent further use of Reddit content.