On Wednesday, Reddit took the rare step of filing a lawsuit against AI startup Anthropic in San Francisco Superior Court, accusing the Google-backed company of repeatedly accessing Reddit’s platform without permission. According to Reddit’s complaint (PDF version), Anthropic’s bots made over 100,000 unauthorized requests to Reddit between July 2024 and the present, despite Anthropic having purportedly assured Reddit that its bots were blocked from crawling the site.

Reddit paints Anthropic as a “late-blooming artificial intelligence (‘AI’) company that bills itself as the white knight of the AI industry,” only to “ignore any rules that interfere with its attempts to further line its pockets.” In its filing, Reddit alleges that Anthropic projected a public image of respect for legal boundaries while clandestinely scraping Reddit’s trove of human-generated content to train its Claude chatbot. According to Reddit’s Chief Legal Officer Ben Lee, Anthropic’s “commercial exploitation” of freely available Reddit posts could be worth billions for Anthropic if left unchecked.

At its core, Reddit’s lawsuit underscores the tension between AI companies hungry for diverse, real-world training data and platforms seeking to protect their users’ content and monetize access. Reddit boasts nearly 20 years of discussions—from niche hobbyist subreddits to widespread political debates—that simply do not exist elsewhere. “Reddit’s humanity is uniquely valuable in a world flattened by AI,” Lee wrote in an emailed statement to The Verge, stressing that these conversations are “central to training language models like Claude.”

Reddit’s fight against unauthorized scraping is not new. In February 2024, Reddit signed a landmark deal with Google—worth a reported $60 million per year—granting Google the right to access Reddit content for its AI initiatives. That partnership effectively made Google the only major technology company allowed to freely crawl Reddit’s newest posts and comments. In response to mounting pressure from other AI players, Reddit updated its robots.txt file around late July 2024, blocking most automated crawlers unless they held a valid licensing agreement.

Shortly after these changes, Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity openly criticized Reddit for “acting as though all of the content on the internet is free to use.” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman stated that blocking these companies has been “a real pain in the ass,” but emphasized that any entity wishing to train large language models on Reddit data must negotiate a commercial arrangement. Huffman’s remarks illustrated how AI firms frequently relied on publicly available web content—sometimes ignoring voluntary restrictions like robots.txt—to bootstrap their models. Those firms argued that robots.txt was not a legally enforceable contract, but Reddit’s position has been that honoring its policies is the baseline for any “good-faith actor.”

Despite taking these steps, Reddit claims Anthropic ignored the updated rules. Reddit’s lawsuit contends that whenever its platform updated robots.txt or otherwise tried to block unauthorized crawlers, Anthropic found new IP addresses to continue scraping. Reddit points out that this conduct violated both its user agreement—which explicitly prohibits commercial scraping of content without a license—and basic internet standards designed to curb unwanted bot traffic.

Anthropic was quick to respond. In a statement to The Verge, an Anthropic spokesperson said, “We disagree with Reddit’s claims and will defend ourselves vigorously.” The startup insists it has always tried to respect publishers’ requests, although it has been accused of “egregious” scraping by other online communities. In July 2024, for instance, users on Freelancer.com had to block Anthropic’s crawlers due to repeated, unwelcome requests that slowed their site—despite standard web protocols indicating they should be blocked. Anthropic claimed it was investigating, and argued that it did not intend to be “intrusive or disruptive.”

Anthropic’s founder, Dario Amodei, has positioned the company as one of the more ethically minded AI labs. The CEO has emphasized safety and principled AI development, distancing Anthropic from other large model builders like OpenAI. Yet the new lawsuit suggests that, in practice, Anthropic may have prioritized rapid data accumulation over strict adherence to websites’ terms of service. Reddit’s suit focuses on the period after July 2024—when, according to Reddit, the startup had already assured the platform that its bots would no longer crawl Reddit.