Judge advances most of Reddit's data-scraping lawsuit against Anthropic

A San Francisco judge allowed most of Reddit's lawsuit against Anthropic to proceed, ruling that three of five claims can move forward while two others were dismissed but may be refiled. The case accuses the AI company of scraping user data without permission to train its Claude chatbot. Judge Harold Kahn overruled Anthropic's demurrer on claims of breach of contract, interference with contract, and violation of California's unfair competition law. He rejected Anthropic's argument that Reddit's user agreement was unenforceable, citing evidence that Anthropic scraped the site over 100,000 times after Reddit's CEO publicly objected. Claims for unjust enrichment and trespass to chattels were dismissed as too vague, with a refiling deadline of Oct. 16. Reddit filed the lawsuit in June 2025, alleging Anthropic used bots to access content without consent and trained Claude on users' personal data. Reddit has separately licensed data to Google and OpenAI, and its spokesperson said the ruling sends a message that AI companies cannot ignore contract law and privacy commitments. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.