Reddit’s scraping lawsuit against Anthropic can move forward

Reddit cleared an early procedural hurdle in its lawsuit against Anthropic over training data for Claude. A San Francisco County Superior Court judge rejected Anthropic’s attempt to knock out the core of the case, allowing Reddit to keep pursuing claims for breach of contract, interference with contract and violation of California’s unfair competition law.

The judge trimmed two other claims, unjust enrichment and trespass to chattels, but gave Reddit a chance to amend them. That keeps the case alive around a question that matters well beyond this dispute: whether AI companies can rely on broad web scraping when a platform’s user agreement and commercial data deals say otherwise.

Reddit argues Anthropic used automated bots to access Reddit content and trained Claude on user posts without permission. The company also points to its separate licensing agreements with Google and OpenAI as evidence that AI labs can obtain platform data under negotiated rules rather than by scraping.

Anthropic had argued that Reddit’s terms were not an enforceable contract because users did not explicitly click to accept them. The judge said Reddit had alleged enough for that argument to be tested later, including claims that Anthropic continued scraping after public objections from Reddit’s leadership.