Reddit’s lawsuit against Anthropic and its separate lawsuit against Perplexity AI are two active cases accusing the AI companies of scraping Reddit user content to build their chatbots without paying for a license. The Anthropic case, filed in June 2025 in California state court, rests on breach of contract and trespass theories. The Perplexity case, filed in October 2025 in federal court in New York, targets Perplexity along with three data-scraping intermediaries and leads with a claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Neither suit alleges copyright infringement, which is a deliberate strategic choice.
The Anthropic Case
Reddit sued Anthropic, PBC in San Francisco Superior Court on June 4, 2025.1CBS News. Reddit Sues Anthropic Over AI Training Data Scraping The complaint brings five California-law claims: breach of contract, unjust enrichment, trespass to chattels, tortious interference with contract, and unfair competition.2Courthouse News Service. Reddit Privacy Case Against Anthropic Kicked Back to State Court
Reddit alleges Anthropic began scraping Reddit posts and comments as early as December 2021 and continued through at least April 2024, maintaining a whitelist of popular subreddits, including r/explainlikeimfive, r/personalfinance, r/AskHistorians, r/relationship_advice, and r/WritingPrompts, to feed Claude’s training data.3Reddit, Inc. Complaint, Reddit Inc. v. Anthropic PBC After an Anthropic spokesperson said publicly in mid-2024 that the company had blocked its crawler from Reddit, Reddit’s audit logs allegedly showed Anthropic’s bots accessing its servers more than 100,000 times in the months that followed.4FindLaw. Reddits Lawsuit Over Data Scraping Could Reshape the Future of AI
The Contract Theory
Reddit’s core argument is that every visitor to the site, including automated crawlers, is bound by Reddit’s User Agreement. Section 3 prohibits commercial exploitation of Reddit content, and Section 7 prohibits scraping and automated access. Reddit says Anthropic’s ClaudeBot accepted those terms each time it accessed the platform and then broke them by feeding the scraped data into a commercial product.5Eric Goldman Blog. Reddit Challenges Anthropics Scraping to Create Generative AI Models Whether a browsewrap agreement can actually bind a bot is contested. Courts generally require the proponent to show the user had actual or constructive notice of the terms, and that standard is unsettled when the user is automated.6Ropes & Gray. Web Scraping in the Age of AI: Guidance for Data Owners and Scrapers
Why the Case Is Back in State Court
Anthropic removed the case to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in July 2025, arguing that Reddit’s state-law claims were really copyright claims in disguise and therefore preempted by federal law. Anthropic also argued Reddit did not even own the copyright to user posts.2Courthouse News Service. Reddit Privacy Case Against Anthropic Kicked Back to State Court
On March 30, 2026, U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson remanded the case to San Francisco Superior Court. In a 12-page order, she ruled that each of Reddit’s five claims contained elements qualitatively different from a copyright action. The User Agreement, she found, imposed duties about methods of access and technical infrastructure that go beyond anything the Copyright Act covers. On tortious interference, the court pointed to Reddit’s privacy obligations to its users as an extra element with no copyright analogue. On unfair competition, the court cited Reddit’s allegation that Anthropic publicly claimed to honor robots.txt directives while secretly ignoring them.7Loeb & Loeb. Reddit Inc. v. Anthropic PBC
Where the Case Stands
An initial round of mediation failed in August 2025. The court has ordered a second private mediation to be completed by August 21, 2026. If that does not resolve the dispute, a jury trial is scheduled for February 14 through March 8, 2028.8CourtListener. Reddit Inc. v. Anthropic PBC Docket
The Perplexity Case
On October 22, 2025, Reddit filed a second lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The defendants are Perplexity AI and three data-scraping intermediaries: SerpApi of Austin, Texas; Oxylabs UAB of Lithuania; and AWMProxy of Russia.9Reuters. Reddit Sues Perplexity for Scraping Data to Train AI System
What Reddit Claims
The lead claim is federal: violation of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision, 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)(A). Reddit says the defendants bypassed technological measures on both Reddit and Google’s search results to harvest user content at industrial scale. The complaint also brings claims for unjust enrichment, unfair competition, and civil conspiracy.10SDNY Blog. Reddit Sues Perplexity AI and Data Scrapers for Industrial Scale Theft
The alleged mechanism is unusual. According to the complaint, the intermediary defendants scraped Reddit content indirectly by pulling it from Google search results pages, circumventing both Reddit’s anti-scraping measures and Google’s “SearchGuard” bot-detection system.11Built In. Reddit Perplexity Data Scraping Lawsuit Reddit says it sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter in May 2024, after which Perplexity increased its citations to Reddit content fortyfold rather than backing off.9Reuters. Reddit Sues Perplexity for Scraping Data to Train AI System The complaint also alleges that the intermediary defendants sold scraped data to other major AI companies, including OpenAI and Meta.12The New York Times. Reddit Sues Data Scrapers and Perplexity Over Data Theft
Reddit is seeking a permanent injunction, financial damages, and a ban on any future use or sale of previously scraped Reddit data.12The New York Times. Reddit Sues Data Scrapers and Perplexity Over Data Theft
How the Defendants Have Responded
Perplexity denied scraping Reddit’s data. The company said it honors robots.txt files, that its chatbot simply summarizes and cites public Reddit discussions, and that it does not train foundation models, so a licensing deal would be “impossible.” Perplexity called Reddit’s position “the opposite of the open internet.”11Built In. Reddit Perplexity Data Scraping Lawsuit
SerpApi has been more combative. On March 13, 2026, it moved to dismiss Reddit’s amended complaint (filed in February 2026) with prejudice. SerpApi argues that Reddit lacks standing to bring DMCA claims because it holds only a non-exclusive license to user content while users retain ownership; that Google’s SearchGuard is not an “effective” access control under the DMCA because it allows normal human access; that the specific snippets at issue (date stamps, short phrases, factual addresses) are not copyrightable; and that Reddit’s state-law claims are preempted by the Copyright Act.13PR Newswire. SerpApi Files Motion to Dismiss Reddits Amended Complaint Perplexity also met the March 2026 response deadline, though the substance of its filing has not been reported. Oxylabs and AWMProxy had not responded as of that date.14PPC Land. SerpApi Pushes to Kill Reddits DMCA Suit Over Google Scraping
Why Reddit Didn’t Sue for Copyright Infringement
Neither complaint alleges copyright infringement. That is the through-line connecting both cases and the reason they matter beyond Reddit itself.
Copyright suits over AI training data run into the fair use defense, an unsettled question with more than 40 cases pending as of mid-2025. The U.S. Copyright Office issued a nonbinding report in May 2025 saying the courts, not Congress, should resolve it.15Skadden. Copyright Office Report on AI and Fair Use Reddit’s suits go around that fight. Against Anthropic, the theory is contractual: if you accessed the platform, you agreed to terms that forbid scraping. Against Perplexity and its suppliers, the theory is anti-circumvention: bypassing technological controls to reach copyrighted content violates the DMCA regardless of whether the downstream use might be fair.16Caldwell Law. Reddit Perplexity AI Lawsuit, Contract, and Data Rights
The Licensing Deals Behind the Lawsuits
Reddit has been rebuilding its data as a paid product. By early 2024, ahead of its March IPO, the company had signed licensing agreements worth a combined $203 million over two to three years.17TechCrunch. Reddit Says Its Made $203M So Far Licensing Its Data Google reportedly pays roughly $60 million a year to train its Gemini models on Reddit content, and OpenAI signed a deal in May 2024.18Auburn University Business Law Review. The Google Reddit AI Deal: Strategic Move or a Harbinger Data licensing revenue reached about $140 million in 2025, and Wells Fargo has projected the combined Google and OpenAI deals could grow to roughly $550 million a year on their 2026 renewal.19TIKR. Reddit Fell 6% as Its $550M AI Deal Renewal Looms
In July 2024, Reddit updated its robots.txt file to block crawlers from companies without licensing deals.20The Verge. Reddit Tells Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity to Pay Both complaints point out that Google and OpenAI signed licenses. The lawsuits are the enforcement arm of that strategy, aimed at companies that chose not to pay.
A Note on Lawsuits Against Reddit
Reddit is also a defendant in a separate matter that sometimes gets grouped with the AI scraping cases but is not related to them. A securities fraud class action pending before Judge James Donato in the Northern District of California (Case No. 25-cv-05144) covers a class period from October 29, 2024 through May 20, 2025 and alleges Reddit failed to disclose how Google’s AI Overviews were cutting click-through traffic to the site. Defendants moved to dismiss the amended complaint on February 13, 2026.21Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check. Reddit Inc. Securities Fraud Class Action That case is about what Reddit told investors, not about AI scraping.