Reddit's suit against Anthropic, filed in June 2025, alleging its crawlers accessed the site over 100,000 times after promising to stop and that Claude was trained on Reddit posts without a licence. Framed as breach of contract rather than copyright, since Reddit does not own its users' words. The internet cared because a company that had sold the same data to Google and OpenAI was suing a third party for taking it.
The complaint's central exhibit was a 2021 Anthropic research paper that named Reddit as training data, alongside logs of continued crawling after a July 2024 request to stop. Anthropic said it disagreed with the claims and would defend itself.
A reader recalls that the case was filed in state court, not federal, precisely to avoid the copyright question, a choice explained in threads by lawyers who had read the first paragraph and by everyone else who had not.
Seen on the day of filing when the phrase 'Reddit does not own the posts' was posted several thousand times on Reddit, under a story about Reddit suing over the posts.
You were there. What happened?
