Judge allows most of Reddits lawsuit against Anthropic to proceed

Lawsuit progress

A San Francisco County Superior Court judge has allowed three of Reddit’s five claims against Anthropic to move forward while giving Reddit a chance to amend two others. In an order dated Sept. 17 and filed the following day, Judge Harold Kahn overruled Anthropic’s demurrer. The claims that will proceed are:

• Breach of contract
• Interference with contract
• Violation of California’s unfair competition law

The judge dismissed the claims of unjust enrichment and trespass to chattels, finding them too vague as written, but permitted Reddit to refile them with greater specificity by Oct. 16.

Background

The case originated from a complaint Reddit filed in June 2025, accusing Anthropic of using automated bots to access its platform’s content without permission and training the Claude chatbot on Reddit users’ personal data without consent. Reddit noted it had separately struck licensing deals in 2024 with companies including Google and OpenAI, which it said would allow it to enforce protections such as users’ right to delete their content.

You May Also Like At the time, Reddit’s chief legal officer Ben Lee said AI companies should not be allowed to scrape people’s information and content without clear limitations on how that data can be used, according to the Associated Press.

Legal arguments

Anthropic tried to argue that Reddit’s terms of service constitute an unenforceable “browsewrap” agreement because users never explicitly click “I agree.” The judge rejected this argument, pointing to Reddit’s allegations that Anthropic continued scraping the site more than 100,000 times even after Reddit’s CEO publicly called out the behavior-evidence, he said, that Anthropic knew exactly what it was doing.

Next steps

Judge Kahn dismissed Reddit’s unjust enrichment and trespass‑to‑chattels claims, but gave the company until Oct. 16 to amend and refile them. A Reddit spokesperson said in a statement:

“This ruling sends a strong message - AI companies don’t get a free pass to ignore the law. AI companies cannot scrape data without a license in violation of basic contract law, user privacy commitments and fair business practices. As we look ahead to the next phase of this lawsuit, Reddit remains committed to holding unauthorized scrapers accountable and to protecting the trust of Reddit users.”

Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

About the author

Chance Townsend is the General Assignments Editor at Mashable, covering tech, video games, dating apps, digital culture, and whatever else comes his way. He has a Master’s in Journalism from the University of North Texas and is a proud orange cat father. His writing has also appeared in PC Mag and Mother Jones. In his free time, he cooks, loves to sleep, and greatly enjoys Detroit sports.

You can reach him on Bluesky @offbrandchance.bsky.social, by email at [email protected], or on Signal at 224‑417‑6628.