From Yahoo Finance: 2025-06-12 12:30:00

Reddit has filed a lawsuit against AI startup Anthropic for scraping Reddit content over 100,000 times without permission. Anthropic, backed by Amazon and Alphabet, allegedly violated Reddit’s user agreement and ignored robots.txt instructions. Reddit offered licensing options to Anthropic, but the company continued to use Reddit content without a formal agreement.

Reddit claims Anthropic profited “tens of billions of dollars” from the unauthorized use of Reddit content. Anthropic is accused of violating terms of service while portraying itself as a champion of AI ethics. The lawsuit marks the first time a major tech platform has taken legal action against an AI model developer over training data access without a license.

The case could set legal standards for data usage and impact how AI systems engage with publicly available content. Reddit supports the open internet but believes AI companies need clear limitations on using public content. This lawsuit could reshape how AI companies source content and impact the competitive landscape for startups like Anthropic.



Read more at Yahoo Finance: AI Startup Anthropic Faces Reddit’s Legal Fire Over Data Scraping Across 100K+ Accesses Starting July 2024