Being sued by Reddit, Anthropic wants a look at OpenAI's files
The oddest detail of this case is the seating chart. Reddit is suing Anthropic in San Francisco Superior Court (Reddit v. Anthropic, case CGC-25-625892), and in the middle of defending itself, Anthropic has asked the court to drag OpenAI into the room. On September 21, it filed a motion to compel against OpenAI OpCo, seeking further responses and production on 25 of the 34 requests in a subpoena served June 16, plus sanctions. The motion is listed for a hearing on November 12 at 9 a.m. in Department 302. No ruling has been granted.
The reporting comes from RuntimeWire, which based its story on the actual court filings — the motion, the 95-page separate statement, and OpenAI's own letters attached to Anthropic's declaration — checked against the live court register on October 4. The documents are public; the interpretation is what we are summarizing here.
Five requests are the story
The heart of the motion is requests 28 through 32. They ask for:
- Records of OpenAI's implementation of Reddit's Compliance API, the system Reddit says automatically notifies licensees when users delete posts or comments, including deletion-event logs or summaries.
- Evidence of deletion or suppression across systems, datasets, products, and customer-facing outputs after deletion events.
- Records of failures, outages, delays, backlogs, and technical limitations in that process.
- Records of third-party complaints about failures to delete Reddit content.
- Records addressing whether Reddit content can be removed or suppressed from models that are already trained.
Anthropic's argument, as the filing lays it out: Reddit's privacy and interference claims depend on whether the deletion guardrails it imposes on licensed AI companies actually operate as Reddit describes them. OpenAI, as Reddit's named commercial licensee, is the test case. If the system works as advertised on OpenAI's end, Reddit's story about its licensing regime holds up. If it doesn't, Anthropic has a defense.
What the filings don't establish
A motion's wish list is not a finding. Read carefully, the same filings undercut the temptation to treat this as a scandal about OpenAI:
- Nothing in the filings establishes that OpenAI mishandled deleted posts, or that Reddit's system failed. The records Anthropic wants could just as easily confirm that the deletion machinery works.
- OpenAI's side is visible only through its own letters, attached to Anthropic's filing. In September correspondence, OpenAI said material available from Reddit should be sought from Reddit first, asked for narrower scope and specific factual justifications, and declined Anthropic's request to extend the motion deadline to December 9. It also said it remains open to reasonable production. That is a party protecting its documents, not a confession.
- The underlying Reddit v. Anthropic claims themselves are still moving: on September 18, the breach-of-contract, interference, and unfair-competition claims survived a demurrer; unjust enrichment and trespass to chattels were sustained with leave to amend.
There is also a secondary layer worth noting: other requests in the subpoena seek OpenAI's records of pre-license Reddit access (requests 9–12), internal valuations of Reddit data (requests 1, 2, 7, 13–17, 19–23, 27), and even OpenAI's nonprivileged assessments of Anthropic and Claude (requests 33–34). Anthropic wants to test Reddit's claims about licensing losses and competitive injury from every angle. None of these requests disclose anything new about OpenAI's conduct on their own.
The context: deleting a row is easy; deleting it from a model is not
Some background the motion takes for granted. OpenAI and Reddit announced their licensing partnership in May 2024: OpenAI gets access to Reddit's Data API, and Reddit content flows into ChatGPT and other products. Reddit's public developer materials describe the deletion side of the bargain — developers must remove or modify user content after a deletion or written request, and a separate data protection addendum gives covered personal data ten days. But those are developer documents. What OpenAI's commercial license actually requires, and what happens to that obligation once a post has been absorbed into training data, is exactly what request 32 is probing.
That request is the one that matters beyond this case. Removing a post from a database is an operation. Removing it from a training dataset is a project. Suppressing it in a product's output is yet another operation. Removing it from the weights of an already-trained model is, in the general case, an unsolved problem — the field's honest answer is usually retraining, which nobody does per-post, or post-hoc suppression, which is not the same as deletion. Every AI company selling licensed data deals that promise deletion on request is standing in front of this same technical wall.
What to watch
November 12, in Department 302. Not for the outcome of a subpoena fight between two rivals — interesting as that is — but for whether the court forces an actual answer to request 32. If OpenAI has to produce documents describing whether and how Reddit content can be removed from trained models, the resulting record will do something unusual: put a legal filing's worth of evidence next to an industry claim that is usually just asserted in licensing decks. Either way, the record will be more useful than the motion's headline.
Sources
- [1] RuntimeWire, “Anthropic wants OpenAI to show its work on deleted Reddit posts” (Oct 4, 2026, original court-document reporting)Read source