Reddit sued Anthropic on Wednesday

in San Francisco superior court, claiming that the OpenAI rival had accessed its platform more than 100,000 times since July 2024, after Anthropic allegedly said it had blocked its bots from doing so.

In the filing, Reddit calls Anthropic a “late-blooming artificial intelligence (‘AI’) company that bills itself as the white knight of the AI industry,” alleging that “it is anything but.”

“This case is about the two faces of Anthropic: the public face that attempts to ingratiate itself into the consumer’s consciousness with claims of righteousness and respect for boundaries and the law, and the private face that ignores any rules that interfere with its attempts to further line its pockets.”

Anthropic did not immediately provide a comment.

Ben Lee, Reddit’s chief legal officer, said in an emailed statement to The Verge that Anthropic’s “commercial exploitation” of Reddit content could be worth billions of dollars.

“Reddit’s humanity is uniquely valuable in a world flattened by AI,“ Lee said. ”Now more than ever, people are seeking authentic human-to-human conversation. Reddit hosts nearly 20 years of rich, human discussion on virtually every topic imaginable. These conversations don’t happen anywhere else—and they’re central to training language models like Claude.”