Anthropic Tries to Keep Reddit Scraping Row in Federal Court (2)

Reddit Inc.'s lawsuit against Anthropic PBC implicates federal copyright law and must remain before a federal court, the AI developer said.

Reddit’s allegation that Anthropic scraped the platform’s user posts to train its large language model is a “quintessential” copyright claim—but because Reddit doesn’t own the copyrights to user content, it “artfully plead its copyright-like claims in contract and tort,” Anthropic wrote Tuesday in an opposition to Reddit’s motion to send the the action back to state court from the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

“These mere labels do not and cannot change the gravamen of Reddit’s suit or the proper forum for it,” Anthropic wrote.

How Judge Susan Illston decides the copyright preemption question could determine the case’s ultimate outcome and reverberate on potential similar cases in the future.

“Reddit wants to avoid a pure copyright fight because those claims are harder to prove,” Vivek Jayaram, an intellectual property attorney, said. “State law gives them more levers to protect their data.”

Reddit’s lawsuit, filed in June in San Francisco Superior Court, includes claims of breach of contract, unjust enrichment, tortious interference, and unfair competition. Anthropic removed the case to federal court in July.

In its motion to remand the case earlier this month, Reddit insisted its claims aren’t completely preempted by US copyright law because each of them contains an extra element that isn’t required for a copyright claim.

Anthropic shot back Tuesday that there’s “no qualitative difference” between copyright claims and Reddit’s state law claims. Although Reddit said complete preemption is “rare,” Anthropic said several courts including California’s Northern District have found such claims “completely preempted where they do not implicate rights that are qualitatively different from those protected by the Copyright Act.”

“This case isn’t about copyright at all,” a Reddit spokesperson said in an emailed statement Wednesday. “Anthropic is claiming that (and attempting to mischaracterize our complaint) to distract from their misconduct and the point of this lawsuit: Anthropic is mistaken if it thinks it can breach Reddit’s terms and ignore our users’ privacy rights with impunity.”

Adam Eisgrau, senior director of AI and creativity at the Big Tech-backed Chamber of Progress, said Anthropic was right to remove the case and that the court would be “right to keep it there just long enough to dismiss it.”

“Reddit’s transparent attempt to sue Anthropic for copyright infringement by dressing up that exclusively federal action as a brace of state claims remains an inartful dodge that’s wasting the court’s time and resources,” he said in an email.

If Reddit is successful in yanking the case back to state court, it could “embolden” platforms to sue AI companies under state law, Jayaram said. On the flip side, an Anthropic victory could “narrow the tools” platforms use to enforce their terms of service against web scrapers, he said.

Morrison & Foerster LLP and Conrad Metlitzky Kane LLP represents Anthropic. Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP represents Reddit.

The case is Reddit Inc. v. Anthropic PBC, N.D. Cal., No. 3:25-cv-05643, opposition filed 9/16/25.