Reddit's lawsuit accusing Anthropic of scraping its site to train Claude just survived a major legal test.
San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Harold Kahn ruled on Sept. 17 that three of Reddit's five claims against Anthropic can move forward: breach of contract, interference with contract, and violation of California's unfair competition law. He also rejected Anthropic's argument that Reddit's user agreement was an unenforceable browsewrap contract, pointing to allegations that Anthropic scraped the site more than 100,000 times even after Reddit's CEO publicly called out the behavior. Two other claims, unjust enrichment and trespass to chattels, were dismissed as too vague, but Kahn gave Reddit until Oct. 16 to refile them with more detail. The case traces back to a complaint Reddit filed in June 2025 over Anthropic's alleged use of automated bots to pull user content and train Claude without consent.
This is one of the clearer wins so far for a publisher trying to make AI scraping stick as a contract violation, not just a copyright fight. Reddit already has paid licensing deals with Google and OpenAI that spell out data rights like user deletion requests, deals Anthropic apparently skipped. If the contract and unfair competition claims hold up at trial, it strengthens the argument that ignoring a platform's terms of service to train a model is a legal liability, not just a PR problem.
Anthropic still has to fend off two more claims once Reddit refiles them next month, and it has said nothing publicly since the ruling came down.