Reddit's Anthropic Claims Survive in State Court; Ireland Fines Google €403M
Ireland's privacy regulator is forcing changes to Google's historical location-data practices, while a San Francisco state judge has kept core contract and unfair-competition claims against Anthropic alive. The cases price data through different legal rights.
Two September 21 legal developments raise the cost of treating data as a frictionless technology input, but they reach companies through different bodies of law.
Ireland's Data Protection Commission fined Google €403 million over historical location-data processing involving Web & App Activity, Location History and Location Accuracy. The investigation covered May 25, 2018 through February 4, 2020 and found GDPR violations involving lawfulness and fairness, accountability, transparency and retention. The regulator also ordered Google to bring the processing into compliance within six months.
Reddit's case against Anthropic is at a much earlier procedural stage. Reddit originally sued in San Francisco Superior Court. Anthropic removed the case to federal court, arguing that federal copyright law completely pre-empted the state claims. On March 30, U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson sent the case back to state court, finding that the jurisdictional standard for complete pre-emption had not been met.
The September ruling came from San Francisco Superior Court Judge Harold Kahn, not a federal judge. Kahn largely rejected Anthropic's attempt to dispose of the complaint at the pleading stage, allowing core breach-of-contract and unfair-competition theories to proceed. Final liability and damages remain for later proceedings, and the ruling creates no general prohibition on training models with publicly accessible web data.
Contract rights and privacy duties create different data economics
The Google order operates inside the company's own data lifecycle. Privacy law can constrain how personal information is collected, explained to users, retained and repurposed. The economic cost can extend beyond a one-time fine when compliance changes product design, retention periods or internal data flows.
Reddit's theory concerns the terms under which an outside company accessed a platform. Contract and unfair-competition claims can survive as separate legal theories even when a defendant argues that the dispute belongs exclusively in copyright law. For data owners, that gives access terms and licensed channels economic importance independent of whether a court ultimately finds copyright infringement.
For AI developers, the distinction affects where cost appears. Licensed access creates an explicit acquisition expense. Unlicensed scraping can avoid that upfront payment while carrying litigation, engineering and compliance risk tied to platform terms. The September ruling raises the probability that Anthropic will have to litigate those state-law obligations on the merits; whether Anthropic breached them remains open.
The two cases support a narrower conclusion than the slogan that "scraping is illegal." Data rights are becoming more granular across privacy, contract and copyright law. Google faces regulatory duties over personal-data processing and retention. Anthropic faces state-law claims over how it allegedly accessed Reddit's platform. Companies building large datasets increasingly have to price both kinds of rights into provenance, storage and acquisition decisions.
Sources
https://www.dataprotection.ie/en/news-media/latest-news/data-protection-commission-fines-google-eu403-million-following-inquiry-googles-processing-location https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/anthropic-loses-bid-to-dismiss-reddit-ai-scraping-privacy-suit https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/reddit-v-anthropic-remand-order.pdf