Reddit Calls Anthropic a 'Freeriding Pirate' and Cites Ruling Behind $1.5B Settlement
The July 17 opposition says Anthropic scraped Reddit's own User Agreement and invokes the Bartz decision's distinction between fair-use training and unlawful acquisition.
By Ryan Merket · Published
Why it matters
The filing shows AI developers can be held accountable not only for how they use scraped data but also for how they acquire it, signaling that court‑approved piracy settlements may become a template for future AI‑training lawsuits.
Reddit is using the court ruling behind Anthropic's $1.5 billion book-piracy settlement to fight the AI company's attempt to dismiss a separate lawsuit over its alleged scraping of Reddit.
Reddit's July 17 opposition to Anthropic's demurrer labels the AI startup a "freeriding pirate" and argues that Anthropic cannot deem Reddit's User Agreement unenforceable after allegedly scraping that agreement. The filing, made in San Francisco Superior Court (case CGC-25-625892), asks Judge Joseph M. Quinn to reject Anthropic's request to dismiss the state-law claims before discovery.
The hearing is set for August 12 at 9 a.m. If the judge lets the case proceed, Reddit will be able to pursue breach-of-contract, unjust-enrichment, trespass to chattels, tortious interference and unfair-competition claims that it lodged in June 2025.
Scraping the agreement itself
Reddit's lawyers present four theories for why Anthropic had actual notice of the User Agreement's terms. Reddit alleges that Anthropic scraped the User Agreement itself, giving it actual notice of the terms. The filing also says Reddit warned Anthropic in 2023 and 2024 that it lacked permission to scrape the site, that Anthropic's personnel ostensibly accepted the agreement when signing into Reddit accounts, and that the agreement was prominently linked - reasonable notice for a sophisticated corporate user.
Anthropic's own anti-scraping rules
To underscore Anthropic's knowledge of anti-scraping norms, Reddit attached Anthropic's Consumer Terms, which took effect on October 8, 2025. Those terms forbid customers from "crawling, scraping or harvesting information" from Anthropic's services and from using Anthropic's platforms to train competing AI systems. Although the alleged Reddit scraping occurred between 2021 and 2024 - before those terms were in force - Reddit argues the existence of such policies demonstrates Anthropic's familiarity with the legal and technical limits of data harvesting.
Borrowing from the Bartz piracy case
Reddit also leans on the Bartz v. Anthropic decision that later produced the $1.5 billion settlement approved on July 20 Reuters. That ruling drew a line between lawful AI training and unlawful acquisition of source material, holding that using books obtained from pirate libraries does not become lawful merely because the downstream training use is transformative. The court's language likened piracy to "the point" of the case.
Reddit's filing echoes that analogy, comparing the situation to a bookstore that can stop thieves from photocopying its inventory: "Just as a bookstore can stop thieves from breaking in and photocopying its entire inventory - works to which the bookstore has no copyright ownership - Reddit can stop Anthropic from illicitly accessing and scraping Reddit's entire inventory."
The July 17 opposition appears to be the first reported instance of Reddit deploying the Bartz piracy ruling in its case against Anthropic.
Context of the broader dispute
Reddit first sued Anthropic in June 2025, alleging that the Claude model was trained on Reddit content without a licensing agreement. The complaint includes five California state-law claims. Reddit alleges that Anthropic's bots accessed or attempted to access the platform more than 100,000 times after Anthropic publicly said it had placed Reddit on its crawler block list. Anthropic moved the case to federal court, arguing that the claims were essentially copyright actions. A federal judge remanded the case to state court on March 30, 2026, noting that contractual and technical trespass issues remained.
Anthropic previously said it disagreed with Reddit's allegations and would "defend ourselves vigorously."
What comes next
If the demurrer is denied, Reddit could move toward discovery and seek internal evidence concerning how Anthropic collected, stored and used Reddit data. The immediate issue before the court is whether Reddit's contract, trespass and unfair-competition theories can proceed beyond the pleading stage.