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Judge lets three of Reddit's claims against Anthropic proceed and dismisses two

Sep 17, 2026 · Gathered automatically from public sources. Not reviewed by a person.

What happened

On 17 September 2026, Judge Harold E. Kahn of the San Francisco County Superior Court issued a mixed ruling on Anthropic's demurrer in Reddit, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC, No. CGC-25-625892 (order filed 18 September 2026). Reddit sued Anthropic on 4 June 2025, alleging the company used automated bots to scrape Reddit content without permission to train its Claude models — with more than 100,000 access attempts alleged after July 2024, when Anthropic had publicly said it blocked its bots from crawling Reddit. The judge overruled the demurrer for three claims, letting them proceed: breach of contract, tortious interference with contract, and unfair competition under California law (Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 17200), rejecting Anthropic's argument that federal copyright law preempted them. But the judge sustained the demurrer — i.e., dismissed — two other claims: unjust enrichment and trespass to chattels, finding them too vague as pleaded and giving Reddit until 16 October to refile with more specificity. The case had been briefly removed to federal court (N.D. Cal. No. 3:25-cv-05643) and was remanded to state court on 30 March 2026, so this ruling is a state-court demurrer order, not a federal motion-to-dismiss ruling. Anthropic denies the allegations and says it will defend itself vigorously.

Why it may matter to you

Unlike a copyright fair-use fight, this case turns on platform terms of service and whether they are enforceable against AI scrapers — a theory that, if it succeeds, would give platforms (and indirectly the creators posting on them) a lever independent of copyright law. The case also spotlights the licensing contrast: OpenAI and Google licensed Reddit's data for training; Anthropic did not, and is now litigating instead.

What is not yet known

Surviving a demurrer is a procedural step, not a finding that Anthropic scraped Reddit or infringed anything — the merits remain to be decided. It is also unresolved how Reddit's own user agreements (which give the platform broad licenses to user content) affect what individual redditors can claim about their posts being used for training.

Sources