Lawsuit tracker
Reddit v. Anthropic
Reddit, Inc. v. Anthropic, PBC (San Francisco Superior Court; removed as No. 3:25-cv-05643, N.D. Cal., then remanded)
| Plaintiffs | Reddit, Inc. |
|---|---|
| Defendants | Anthropic, PBC |
| Court | San Francisco County Superior Court (briefly removed to the Northern District of California; remanded March 2026) |
| Filed | 2025-06-04 |
| Status | Active |
| Content type | platform data |
| Last updated | 2026-07-21 |
The claims
Breach of contract (user agreement), unjust enrichment, trespass to chattels, tortious interference with contract, and California unfair competition. No copyright claim.
What has happened
Reddit sued Anthropic in June 2025 over scraping Reddit content to train Claude. The complaint deliberately avoids copyright, since users, not Reddit, own their posts. Instead it runs on Reddit’s user agreement and state business torts, and alleges Anthropic’s crawlers hit Reddit more than 100,000 times after the company said it had stopped crawling the site. Reddit contrasts Anthropic with Google and OpenAI, which signed paid licensing deals for Reddit data. Anthropic removed the case to federal court within days, arguing the claims were copyright claims in disguise and therefore preempted. On March 30, 2026, Judge Trina L. Thompson of the Northern District of California disagreed and remanded, holding the contract and business-tort claims rest on extra elements beyond copyright. The case now proceeds in state court.
Key developments
- 2025-06-04 — Reddit sues Anthropic in San Francisco Superior Court on contract and unfair-competition theories, with no copyright claim.
- 2025-06 — Anthropic removes the case to federal court, arguing complete preemption by the Copyright Act.
- 2026-03-30 — Judge Trina L. Thompson remands to San Francisco Superior Court: the contract and tort claims are not preempted.
Why it matters for training data
This is the cleanest test of whether platform terms of service can do the work copyright cannot. If contract and unjust-enrichment claims hold, a fair-use win elsewhere does not clear scraping risk: taking platform data against the terms is exposure regardless of what a copyright court says about training. The remand ruling matters on its own, because courts have split on whether such claims are preempted, and it hands platforms a template for keeping scraping suits in state court. For buyers, it is another reason licensed platform data and unlicensed scraped data are not the same product.
Sources
- Crowell & Moring: remand order analysis
- Courthouse News: case sent back to state court
- Federal docket, No. 3:25-cv-05643 (CourtListener)
- Bloomberg Law: Reddit gets Anthropic scraping suit sent back to state court
Deeper analysis
Want data that clears this in diligence?
Whether you're building a model or sitting on an archive, the first conversation is short and specific.
Send a brief