Reddit v. Anthropic

The allegations

Reddit filed suit in June 2025 over Anthropic's use of Reddit content to train Claude, but it deliberately avoided a copyright theory — Reddit's users, not Reddit, own the posts. Instead, the complaint runs on Reddit's user agreement and California business-tort law: breach of contract, unjust enrichment, trespass to chattels, tortious interference and unfair competition. Reddit alleges Anthropic's crawlers hit the site more than 100,000 times even after Anthropic represented that it had stopped crawling, and it points to the paid licensing agreements Google and OpenAI separately signed for access to Reddit data as the industry baseline Anthropic didn't meet.

The trespass-to-chattels claim is worth flagging on its own: it's an older tort originally developed for physical interference with someone else's property, here repurposed for unauthorized server access by automated crawlers. That theory has a mixed track record in past disputes over web scraping, and its application to AI-training crawlers specifically hasn't been tested by any appellate court, so its ultimate viability in this case remains genuinely open even after the remand.

The legal question

The case tests whether platform terms of service and state business-tort law can reach conduct that a fair-use ruling in a copyright case might not. Anthropic's position on removal was that Reddit's claims, however labeled, were really about unauthorized copying of content — a copyright claim in disguise — and that the Copyright Act completely preempts state-law claims covering the same conduct, which would put the case in federal court and potentially subject to copyright-specific defenses like fair use.

The ruling and its limits

Judge Thompson disagreed. In a March 30, 2026 order — following a tentative ruling issued March 20 — she held that Reddit's claims for breach of contract, unjust enrichment, trespass to chattels, tortious interference and unfair competition rest on elements beyond copyright and are therefore not preempted by the Copyright Act, and remanded the case to San Francisco Superior Court. That ruling resolves a jurisdictional and preemption question only. It says nothing about whether Anthropic actually breached Reddit's user agreement, whether its crawling caused compensable harm, or whether Reddit will win on any of its claims — those merits questions now go back to state court to be litigated from scratch.

Where it stands

The case is active in San Francisco Superior Court following the March 2026 remand. No trial date has been reported, and no court has ruled on the substance of Reddit's contract or tort claims. Anthropic's overall litigation exposure isn't limited to this docket, either: the company separately reached a roughly $1.5 billion settlement in 2025 over unrelated claims that it trained models on pirated books, a reminder that resolving one class of training-data claims doesn't clear a structurally different claim, over a different kind of content, proceeding on its own track.

Why it matters for training-data licensing

This is the cleanest test yet of whether platform terms of service can do work that copyright law can't. If Reddit's contract and business-tort claims ultimately succeed, a fair-use win in a copyright court elsewhere won't clear scraping risk on its own — taking platform data in violation of stated terms remains its own source of exposure, litigated on entirely separate legal grounds.

The remand ruling also matters procedurally: courts have split nationally on whether this kind of claim is preempted by copyright law, and this decision hands platforms a working template for keeping scraping disputes in state court, on their own contractual terms, rather than folded into federal copyright litigation. For buyers, it reinforces a distinction worth pricing into diligence directly: licensed platform data (the Google and OpenAI Reddit deals) and unlicensed scraped data are not interchangeable inputs, regardless of what any parallel fair-use ruling eventually says about copyright.

The dispute also sits inside a broader pattern: platforms sitting on valuable user-generated content have increasingly pursued a two-track strategy of suing unlicensed scrapers while simultaneously signing licensing deals with cooperative AI companies, effectively using litigation to help set the price of the deals they're willing to make. That strategy turns litigation itself into a negotiating lever, which is part of why preemption rulings like this one matter well beyond the two parties directly involved.