The Pulse
Anthropic Loses Bid to Dismiss Reddit AI-Scraping Suit
A San Francisco judge largely rejected Anthropic’s effort to dismiss Reddit’s lawsuit accusing the AI company of scraping user content to train its models, finding that the company’s breach-of-contract and unfair-competition claims contain
AI.info Team ·
“Each of these claims is rooted in part on substantial state interests outside the sphere of the Copyright Act,”
Harold E. Kahn, San Francisco Superior Court judge
A San Francisco judge has largely rejected Anthropic’s effort to dismiss Reddit’s lawsuit accusing the AI company of scraping user content to train its models, allowing the dispute to proceed under California law.
Judge Harold E. Kahn’s ruling keeps alive Reddit’s breach-of-contract and unfair-competition claims. Kahn found that those claims contain elements beyond the copying of expressive works, including allegations that Anthropic accessed Reddit in violation of contractual restrictions and trained models without a process for honoring users’ deletion requests.
The order does not end the case. Anthropic won dismissal of some claims, narrowing Reddit’s lawsuit while leaving its central state-law theories in place. The result is a mixed decision rather than a complete victory for either side.
Why the Copyright Act Did Not End the Case
Anthropic argued that Reddit’s lawsuit was effectively a copyright dispute because it concerned the copying and use of Reddit posts in AI training. The argument sought to treat Reddit’s state-law claims as preempted by federal copyright law, which would have removed the contractual and privacy theories from the case.
Kahn rejected that approach for the surviving claims. Reddit’s allegations concern not only the content itself, but also the manner in which Anthropic allegedly accessed the platform, the purposes for which it used the data, and its obligations under Reddit’s User Agreement. The judge also pointed to allegations that Anthropic’s training process lacked a mechanism to respect later deletion requests from Reddit users.
That reasoning follows an earlier federal ruling in the same dispute. In March, U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson sent the case back to San Francisco Superior Court after finding that Reddit’s claims included “extra elements” qualitatively different from rights protected by copyright law. Thompson’s remand order cited contractual access restrictions, technical safeguards, privacy obligations and alleged misrepresentations as examples.
Reddit’s Allegations About ClaudeBot
Reddit filed the lawsuit in San Francisco Superior Court on June 4, 2025. The company alleges that Anthropic accessed or attempted to access Reddit more than 100,000 times after saying it had stopped, and that the activity supplied data for Claude and related AI products.
Reddit’s complaint says Anthropic began scraping the platform as early as 2021 and continued at least through April 2024 for the data used to train Claude. The company also alleges that Anthropic refused to enter a licensing agreement, even as Reddit negotiated paid data partnerships with other AI companies.
Those allegations come from Reddit’s complaint, not findings after a trial. The filing says Anthropic’s activity bypassed technical controls, imposed additional strain on Reddit’s infrastructure and deprived the company of licensing revenue. Reddit seeks damages, restitution and an injunction barring Anthropic from using Reddit data in its commercial offerings.
Reddit’s Licensing Strategy Takes Center Stage
The case tests a legal theory that places the dispute over access and platform rules ahead of a direct copyright claim. Reddit says it can control commercial use of its users’ posts through its User Agreement and licensing system, even though individual users generally hold rights in the material they create.
Reddit’s complaint points to its Compliance API, which can notify licensees when users delete posts or comments. The company argues that licensed partners can be required to respect those changes, while an unauthorized scraper may retain material after deletion and provide no comparable protection.
Reddit announced a data-licensing agreement with Google in February 2024 and a separate partnership with OpenAI in May 2024. Those deals form part of the company’s argument that AI developers seeking commercial access to Reddit content should negotiate terms rather than collect the data outside its licensing framework.
A Narrower Case, Not a Finished One
Anthropic’s partial success leaves Reddit with a case centered on access conditions, contractual promises, user privacy and the operation of the platform itself. The ruling does not decide whether Anthropic actually violated Reddit’s User Agreement, whether the alleged scraping occurred as described or what damages Reddit may recover.
Those questions now move toward evidence and trial proceedings in state court. The immediate legal result is narrower: Anthropic has avoided some claims, but its attempt to characterize the entire lawsuit as a copyright action has failed.