Reddit's lawsuit accusing Anthropic of harvesting its forums to train Claude will be argued under California contract and tort law rather than federal copyright law. US District Judge Trina L. Thompson ruled that none of the five causes of action Reddit filed asserts rights equivalent to those the Copyright Act protects, and returned the case to San Francisco Superior Court in an order signed on Saturday, March 28, 2026 and entered on March 30. The transcript of the March 24 hearing, filed on April 2 and held behind a public-access restriction until July 1, records Anthropic's own counsel agreeing with the judge that Reddit's user agreement lets bots onto the site but draws the line at scraping.

In Short

Reddit sued Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, for using bots to copy Reddit posts, and Anthropic tried to turn the fight into a federal copyright case. A federal judge said no, because Reddit's complaint is about breaking the site's entry rules, misleading Reddit and ignoring users' privacy choices rather than simply copying words, so the case went back to a California state court. That matters because contract and business claims are judged differently from copyright claims, and the fair use arguments that helped AI companies in the book cases are a copyright defence, not a contract one.

A ruling about the forum, with a lot to say about the facts

Reddit filed the case in San Francisco County Superior Court, where it carries the number CGC-25-625892. According to the order, Reddit alleges that Anthropic "used unauthorized automated access to scrape Reddit's content to train and commercialize its AI chatbot, Claude." The complaint pleads five state law claims: breach of contract, unjust enrichment, trespass to chattels, tortious interference with contract, and unfair competition under section 17200 of the California Business and Professions Code.

Anthropic filed a notice of removal on Thursday, July 3, 2025, moving the dispute to the US District Court for the Northern District of California. Its position, as the order summarises it, was that the "essence" of the action concerned the unauthorized use of Reddit's information, so the state claims were preempted by the federal Copyright Act and belonged before a federal judge. The federal docket classified the case under nature of suit 820, copyright, with federal question jurisdiction - the characterisation Judge Thompson went on to reject.

Section 301 of the Copyright Act sets a two-part test. A state claim is preempted if the work at issue falls within the subject matter of copyright and if the state right is "equivalent to any of the exclusive rights within the general scope of copyright," the order states, citing the Ninth Circuit's 2004 decision in Grosso v. Miramax. The second limb fails when a state claim protects rights that are qualitatively different from those copyright protects. To survive, a claim needs what courts call an extra element, one that changes the nature of the action.

The burden sits with the party that removed the case. Federal courts, the order notes, "strictly construe the removal statute against removal jurisdiction," and "[f]ederal jurisdiction must be rejected if there is any doubt as to the right of removal in the first instance."

The conclusion leaves little room for doubt of its own. "Each claim arises from violations of contractual restrictions on the method and purpose of access, technical trespass and server impairment, interference with privacy covenants owed to users, and affirmative misrepresentations made by Anthropic," Judge Thompson wrote. The motion was granted and the action returned to the state docket.

A remand order decides where a case is heard, not who wins it. Yet the 12-page order is written in the language of findings. It states that "the Court finds that Anthropic and Reddit are contractually bound by Reddit's User Agreement," and that Reddit "has met its burden of proof by demonstrating that Anthropic knowingly and intentionally disrupted contractual relationships between Reddit and its users." Those statements rest on the allegations in Reddit's complaint, which Anthropic has not yet had to answer on the merits. At the hearing, Anthropic's counsel drew that distinction himself, describing Reddit's contract theory as "an allegation of a bargain" rather than a fact.

First prong: Reddit's content falls within copyright's reach

The first limb went Anthropic's way, at least in part. Reddit's content, the court found, "at least, is the kind of work covered by the Copyright Act." The order walks through the platform's subreddit communities, posts, comments and voting, and concludes that the content "essentially serves as a repository of natural human language discussions in website format."

Two precedents support that step. The order cites Best Carpet Values v. Google, a 2024 Ninth Circuit decision holding that "[c]ommercial websites are copyrightable," and Craigslist v. 3Taps, a 2013 Northern District ruling that a website displaying a compilation of existing materials clears copyright's minimal creativity threshold. Reddit's content "likely satisfies the first prong of the preemption analysis," the order states.

Reddit had tried to narrow that ground at the hearing. Its lead advocate, who appears on the docket as Richard Worcester of Quinn Emanuel, divided the site's material into three categories: posts written by users, who own the copyright; the structure of the site, including subreddits, the voting system and the way comments are grouped; and a small volume of posts by Reddit itself, in which the company "probably does have a copyright interest." Of the structural layer, he said: "There is no copyright over those sorts of things."

That layer, he argued, is what made Reddit valuable to Anthropic in the first place. Voting pushes the most useful comments up and the least useful down, which tells a model developer what human beings found helpful. The complaint, he said, cites Anthropic's own publications for the reason "they picked 50 very active subreddits among the most popular subreddits on Reddit, where thousands and thousands of people go every day and vote," adding that Anthropic itself "called it good data."

Ragesh Tangri of Morrison & Foerster, arguing for Anthropic, answered briefly. The first prong asks whether material falls within the broad subject matter of copyright, he said, not whether the plaintiff owns it, whether someone else does, or whether it is copyrightable at all. Asked later whether the court needed to distinguish user-owned content from Reddit-owned content, he said that for purposes of the preemption inquiry it did not.

The judge had already signalled where her attention lay. As she began to say which issue concerned the court most, Kelsey Falkenberg of Reddit's legal team supplied the answer - "Prong 2" - and Judge Thompson repeated it.

The user agreement as a contract

Anthropic's main defence against the contract claim was that no contract existed. Reddit's user agreement, it argued, is a "browsewrap agreement," a set of terms posted on a site behind a link rather than accepted with a click, and as a matter of law insufficient to bind anyone.

The court disagreed. Reddit's user agreement, in force since October 15, 2020, tells visitors through a hyperlink that "[b]y accessing or using [Reddit's] Services, you agree to be bound by these Terms. If you do not agree to these Terms, you may not access or use our Services." Even if that is a browsewrap, Judge Thompson wrote, Anthropic "engaged in conduct sufficient to infer actual knowledge of the terms of the User Agreement and to form an implied-in-fact contract with Reddit." The next sentence is blunter: "It is undisputed that Anthropic or its automated bots accessed Reddit's platform despite the notice of the User Agreement on the website."

Several strands of alleged conduct supported the conclusion. After Reddit's chief executive accused Anthropic of exploiting its content, an Anthropic spokesperson denied that the company was still crawling the site; Reddit says it then found that Anthropic had deployed bots to access the platform "more than one hundred thousand times" after the denial. Reddit approached Anthropic about licensing, and Anthropic refused and kept scraping, which the order reads as awareness of Reddit's restricted-access tiers. Anthropic's own user agreement carries similar restrictions against crawling. And the company has publicly stated that it "honor[s] industry standard directives in robots.txt."

PPC Land reported in September 2025 that the spokesperson's statement dates to July 2024, when Anthropic said Reddit had been on its crawler block list since mid-May, and that the complaint attributed the later access to ClaudeBot and other automated systems.

At the hearing, Reddit's counsel went further than the complaint on the question of knowledge. Anthropic had actual knowledge, he said, "certainly as of May 2024 when we sent them a cease and desist letter and told them that they were violating the user agreement and then continued to go on and scrape after that." He then added a point he acknowledged was not in the complaint: "Anthropic has a Reddit account. Claude AI has a Reddit account. Numerous Anthropic employees have Reddit accounts."

Tangri's reply was that Reddit's contract claim already is an implied-in-fact claim, because Reddit alleges assent only through conduct. He compared the arrangement to a parking garage: a driver who parks accepts the posted waiver by parking. The order effectively adopts the same description, conduct manifesting assent, and treats it as enough.

What Sections 3 and 7 prohibit

Having found a contract, the court asked whether its terms impose duties that differ in kind from copyright. Two provisions carried the analysis.

Section 3 grants users "a personal, non-transferable, non-exclusive, revocable, limited license" to access and use Reddit's services. Without Reddit's written agreement, users "may not" do a list of things, including "license, sell, transfer, assign, distribute, host, or otherwise commercially exploit the Services or Content," or "access the Services or Content in order to build a similar or competitive website, product, or service, except as permitted."

Section 7 restricts method. It prohibits using the services "in any manner that could interfere with, disable, disrupt, overburden, or otherwise impair the Services," and bars anyone from accessing, searching or collecting data "by any means (automated or otherwise) except as permitted in these Terms or in a separate agreement with Reddit." Then comes a parenthetical with implications well beyond this case: "we conditionally grant permission to crawl the Services in accordance with the parameters set forth in our robots.txt file, but scraping the Services without Reddit's prior written consent is prohibited."

That clause converts robots.txt, a voluntary protocol, into a condition of a contractual licence. Its practical reach depends on what the file says. In July 2024, Reddit changed its robots.txt so that Google became the only major search engine able to index recent content, five months after Google gained access to Reddit's Data API under an expanded partnership. That requester-specific file is itself now contested. SerpApi's answer to Reddit's separate lawsuit in New York, filed on August 28, 2026, alleges that Reddit served one crawler instruction file to Google and a different one to everybody else, and asks for an injunction under the Sherman Act.

The court found the San Francisco case "no different" from two earlier rulings in the same district. In Craigslist v. Autoposterpro, decided in 2009, claims premised on scraping and automated access in breach of contractual restrictions carried the extra elements needed to escape preemption. In Yu v. ByteDance, decided by Judge Susan Illston in 2023, the court separated claims based purely on copying from those based on scraping in violation of terms of use. Reddit's provisions, Judge Thompson wrote, exist "to protect the right to conditional access to Reddit's platform and prevent 'free-riding' on Reddit's content in ways that are not found in a classical copyright claim."

Anthropic's reliance on Best Carpet Values was "misplaced," the order states. That precedent will be familiar to anyone who follows advertising disputes. There, the Ninth Circuit held that website owners' implied-in-law contract claim, built on allegations that a Google program "superimposed advertisements on their websites' homepages and other landing pages," amounted to preparing derivative works and was preempted. Reddit's claim, by contrast, "rests on Anthropic's methods of access, restricted purposes, and deceptive conduct on Reddit's platform."

Four more claims, four more extra elements

Unjust enrichment

Here Anthropic stood on firmer ground. Unjust enrichment claims are generally preempted, the order acknowledges, because they do not change the rights at issue. It contrasts Reddit's claim with two Northern District rulings in which such claims failed: Daniher v. Pixar in 2022, and Kadrey v. Meta Platforms in November 2023, where an unjust enrichment claim built on copying an author's book to train a language model, without alleging how the model incorporated it, was treated as essentially the same as a copyright claim.

Reddit's version survived because of what it is attached to. The claim, according to the order, is "predicated on Anthropic allegedly bypassing technical safeguards, violating contractual access restrictions, misrepresenting its compliance, and exploiting Reddit's platform without authorization and compensation to train and power its AI chatbot Claude, which enriched Anthropic by billions of dollars."

Tangri had attacked the claim from a different angle at the hearing. Reddit's complaint, he said, pleads unjust enrichment as an implied-in-law claim in the alternative, with a separate prayer for restitution, and Reddit only recast it as an implied-in-fact claim in its reply papers. "Respectfully, that's an 11th hour about-face that is not supported by their pleading," he told the court. The order does not engage with the pleading argument directly. It anchors the unjust enrichment claim in the implied-in-fact contract it had already found.

Trespass to chattels

This claim was never really in dispute. The order records that Anthropic did not argue before the hearing that the trespass claim was preempted, and treats a common-nucleus argument raised at the podium as waived: "The Court does not need to consider this late argument."

The transcript is more nuanced than the order's summary. "We are not, and we did not, we have never alleged that the trespass to chattels claim is preempted," Tangri said. The claim rests on the allegation that crawling slowed the site and interfered with its use, which he said Anthropic considers "disprovable on the merits." His point was that the rest of Reddit's complaint builds on the same facts to reach copying and downloading. Reddit's counsel turned that around, citing page 15 of Anthropic's own brief as acknowledging a common nucleus of operative facts between the trespass claim and every other claim.

Tortious interference

Reddit claims that Anthropic interfered with its obligations to its users, in particular the obligation to protect their privacy. Knowledge and intent are essential elements of interference, and the order cites authority holding that they supply an extra element that is not preempted.

Anthropic's own public commitments did much of the work. Its public comments and user agreement, which state an intention to prioritise honesty, honour robots.txt directives and respect user privacy, "reflect its actual knowledge of the industry standards required to protect user privacy and respect user choices when third parties access a platform," the order states. Reddit's claim concerns enforcement of contractual rights, "including technical measures such as the Compliance API for data deletions, designed to safeguard privacy and choices."

That interface is central to Reddit's commercial model. PPC Land reported that Reddit's licensing agreements require connection to a Compliance API that notifies licensees when users delete posts or comments. At the hearing, Reddit's counsel described the consequence of unlicensed collection in plain terms: a scraper is "not getting the updates from Reddit when information is deleted, and there's no way to know whether or not the user rights are being protected."

Anthropic's answer was textual. Tangri said nothing in Reddit's user agreement promises users that third parties will never download their material, or that anyone who does will delete it on request. He read from Reddit's privacy policy, which warns users that Reddit is a public platform and that they need to take that into account before posting. Reddit's counsel called that framing a "sleight of hand." Agreements do not promise protection from third parties, he said; they promise that the company will protect privacy, and interference arises when someone else undermines that promise.

The order also leaned on two Ninth Circuit precedents. In Altera v. Clear Logic in 2005, violating a limited-use clause was held to be an extra element. In MDY Industries v. Blizzard in 2010, the court held that anti-bot provisions in World of Warcraft's terms were contractual covenants, so a bot user breached the terms without committing copyright infringement.

Unfair competition

California's Unfair Competition Law has three prongs, and the order found an extra element in each. The unlawful prong survived because the parties agreed that trespass and tortious interference serve as predicates. On the unfair prong, the order accepted Reddit's allegation that scraping combined with digital trespass misappropriates its content, which "results in an unfair advantage over competitors who pay their suppliers for similar activities, thereby creating an unfair marketplace."

The fraud prong rested on the spokesperson's denial and the audit logs that followed it, together with Anthropic's public claim that it "prioritizes honesty" and honours robots.txt directives while allegedly ignoring them on Reddit. An intentional misrepresentation, the court held, citing Valente-Kritzer Video v. Pinckney from 1989, is not equivalent to copyright infringement.

Fifty-four minutes in Courtroom 9

The hearing began at 2:23 p.m. on Tuesday, March 24, in Courtroom 9 on the 19th floor of the San Francisco federal courthouse. Morgan Tovey, Kelsey Falkenberg and Worcester appeared for Reddit. Tangri appeared for Anthropic, accompanied by the company's in-house counsel, Paul Johnson. The minute entry records 54 minutes in court.

Judge Thompson opened with an apology. "I apologize for all of the excitement that occurred after I issued a tentative order, and it was very clearly marked tentative," she said. Worcester, for his part, thanked opposing counsel for accommodating him over the weather problem that had affected the previous setting, which the docket shows was January 27.

His argument relied on two images. In the first, Anthropic is a visitor to a bookstore where the history books and romance novels sit on separate shelves. It can browse during opening hours, he said, "but what they absolutely cannot do is break the window at nighttime and go in, right? The store's structure is protected by certain guardrails." In the second, he described himself as an active member of a Reddit forum devoted to Pride and Prejudice. He could type out every post from the past 24 hours by hand and use them in a blog, he said, "because I'm allowed to have access, I am not scraping." What he could not do is gain access and then scrape everything ever said in the forum. "It's not just about copying," he said. "It's the particular type of copying that's being done, which is being done by scraping."

Tangri's case was that the gist of the complaint is copying. Reddit brought state claims, he said, because "they don't own the copyright to the vast majority of this stuff, and so they can't do it, and so they can't get money on it." The complaint itself, at paragraph 39, defines scraping as copying and downloading, which are among the exclusive rights granted by Section 106 of the Copyright Act. Commercial purpose does not change that, he argued, citing the Supreme Court's Sony v. Universal decision. He also observed that the user agreement contains no payment term: "No promise to pay is alleged as part of this user agreement."

He distinguished the two cases the judge said were giving her pause. Craigslist v. Autoposterpro, he said, concerned a tool that automatically posted material onto Craigslist, not copying from it. In Yu v. ByteDance, the claim that escaped preemption involved using copied material to inflate engagement metrics and, in his words, defraud investors.

The sharpest exchange came near the end. Tangri was explaining that Section 7 of Reddit's agreement allows access, bots and scrolling, when the judge interrupted.

"Does it allow bot scraping?" Judge Thompson asked.

"No, that's what it doesn't allow. You're absolutely right, Your Honor. Where it draws the line is scraping," Tangri replied.

The rest of the case turns on how that line is read. For Anthropic, scraping is copying, and copying belongs to copyright. For Reddit, scraping is a prohibited method of access that a visitor agreed to forgo.

Worcester's closing theme was jurisdictional. "The Copyright Act, it is often said, is a floor," he said, arguing that parties can agree between themselves to protections above it. Under the Ninth Circuit's standard, he added, Reddit did not need to prove it belonged in state court, only that there was some doubt about whether it belonged in federal court.

"Well, you've given me quite a bit to think about," the judge said as she took the matter under submission. She could not promise an order within seven to 14 days, she said, but would try. She signed it four days later.

A tentative order, an early notice and a closed docket

The docket fills in what the transcript leaves unsaid. Judge Thompson issued a tentative order on Friday, March 20. On Monday, March 23, a day before the hearing, the clerk entered a notice remanding the case to San Francisco Superior Court with reference to docket entry 54, the tentative order. A later annotation states that the documents were mailed only on March 30, after the final order was granted. The docket does not say whether that notice was the "excitement" the judge referred to.

The route to that hearing was long. On the day of removal, Anthropic also filed the parties' stipulation to stay the case pending mediation, and Judge Susan Illston granted the stay on July 7, 2025. A round of mediation on August 1, 2025 did not produce a settlement, according to a later court order. Reddit moved to remand on August 29, 2025, with a hearing set for October 10. On October 1, 2025, Judge Illston recused herself, and the case was reassigned at random to Judge Thompson, which reset the hearing to January 27, 2026. The judge sent supplemental questions to both sides on January 22, both sides answered on January 26, and the hearing moved to March 24.

The case had meanwhile acquired a full federal schedule. A case management order entered on December 17, 2025 set private mediation to be completed by August 21, 2026, fact discovery to close on January 18, 2027, dispositive motions to be filed by June 7, 2027, and a 14-day jury trial from February 14 to March 8, 2028. None of those dates survives the remand.

The federal case was marked terminated on March 30, 2026. The San Francisco Superior Court sent an acknowledgement letter on April 3, and a final termination entry appears on May 29. Orders remanding a case for lack of federal jurisdiction are generally not reviewable on appeal under 28 U.S.C. section 1447(d), and the federal docket records no attempt to seek review. The attached documents do not show what has happened in the Superior Court since the file returned.

One further docket entry carries commercial interest. Anthropic's corporate disclosure statement, filed on October 1, 2025, identified Alphabet Inc., Google LLC, Amazon.com Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc. as affiliates. Google is also a Reddit data licensee, under the agreement reported at roughly $60 million a year.

Where the record does not add up

The documents contain several errors and inconsistencies. None changes the operative result, but each is worth recording.

  • Whose motion. The order's caption and the docket entry both describe the motion as "DEFENDANT'S MOTION TO REMAND." The motion, docket entry 19, was filed by Reddit, the plaintiff.
  • Whose removal. The conclusion states that "there are doubts as to Reddit's right of removal." It was Anthropic that removed the case.
  • Whose opposition. The trespass section refers to "the four corners of Reddit's opposition that is silent on the trespass to chattels claim." Reddit filed the motion and the reply; the opposition, filed on September 16, 2025, was Anthropic's.
  • Whose burden. The legal standard section quotes Ninth Circuit authority that "[T]he defendant always has the burden of establishing that removal is proper." The tortious interference and unfair competition sections describe Reddit as having met its burden.
  • Dates. The order is dated March 28, 2026, a Saturday, and was filed on March 30. The docket entry for the December 2025 case management order says it was signed on "12/17/2028," although it was filed on December 17, 2025.
  • Names. Reddit's lead advocate is listed in docket filings as Richard Worcester. At the hearing he introduced himself as Corey, the minute entry records Corey Worcester, and the transcript cover spells the name Richard C. Worchester.
  • Transcript attribution. Page 30 of the transcript attributes a passage to "THE WITNESS," although no witness testified; the context shows Reddit's counsel was still reading from the Seventh Circuit's ProCD decision.

Neither the order nor the transcript mentions fair use. Its absence is the point. In June 2025, Judge William Alsup found that training on books was fair use in Bartz v. Anthropic while rejecting the piracy defence, and two days later Judge Vince Chhabria granted Meta summary judgment in Kadrey, the same case whose 2023 unjust enrichment ruling Judge Thompson distinguished. The piracy claims in Bartz ended with Anthropic agreeing in September 2025 to pay at least $1.5 billion.

Fair use is a defence to infringement. It is not a defence to breach of contract, trespass or a fraud-based unfair competition claim. Had the five claims been treated as copyright claims in disguise, they would have been preempted, leaving Reddit, which by its own counsel's account owns little of the copyright in its content, on ground governed by ownership and fair use. The order instead frames the central question as whether Anthropic accepted Reddit's terms and broke them.

Ownership explains why Reddit chose that route, and Anthropic's counsel said as much. Platforms that host user content rarely own the copyright in it, and that gap has surfaced in the anti-scraping cases PPC Land has followed most closely. Reddit's anti-circumvention suit in New York against SerpApi, Oxylabs, AWMProxy and Perplexity, a case that names two suppliers of residential proxy traffic, drew exactly that objection: in March 2026, SerpApi argued that Reddit cannot enforce copyrights it does not own. In California, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed Google's anti-circumvention claims against SerpApi on July 20, 2026 for search pages that contain no copyrighted work. Reddit's New York claims were later allowed to proceed by Judge Paul Engelmayer in late July 2026. The San Francisco case needs no ownership showing at all.

The unjust enrichment line the order draws already has a bearing on another case in the same district. A streamer's class action filed against Twitch and Amazon on August 20, 2026 pleads unjust enrichment and measures the benefit against Reddit's own licensing: roughly $60 million a year reportedly paid by Google, and more than $200 million in AI data licensing revenue that Reddit has reported. Judge Thompson's order separates an unjust enrichment claim tied to bypassed safeguards and misrepresentations, which survives, from one built on copying alone, which Kadrey held equivalent to copyright.

What the licensing market reads from it

Reddit's commercial position rests on the distinction the order accepted. The company licensed its data to Google in February 2024 and to OpenAI in May 2024. Its data licensing revenue reached $36 million in a single quarter, a figure PPC Land set against talks over renewing the Google agreement in July 2026. At Cannes in June 2026, chief executive Steve Huffman argued that commercial use requires commercial terms. The order's unfair competition analysis frames paying licensees as the baseline against which an unlicensed competitor gains an unfair advantage.

Anthropic's public statements about its crawlers cut in an unexpected direction. In February 2026, Anthropic updated its documentation to separate ClaudeBot, Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot, and stated that its bots honour robots.txt and will not attempt to bypass CAPTCHA challenges. The order treats statements of that kind, as quoted in Reddit's complaint, as evidence of actual knowledge for the contract claim and as the misrepresentation underpinning the fraud prong. For an AI operator, a public compliance commitment is also a written record of what the operator knew.

The traffic economics sit in the background. Cloudflare data reported by PPC Land put Anthropic at 286,930 crawls per referral in January 2025, falling to 38,065 by July, the highest imbalance among major platforms at the time. Publishers and platforms have answered with blocks, tolls and licences. The order treats the combination Reddit assembled - written access terms, a robots.txt file referenced in those terms, a deletion interface for licensees and technical safeguards - as the source of obligations that copyright does not supply.

The limits matter as much as the reasoning. This is a district court order on jurisdiction, and it binds no other court. The merits will be decided in San Francisco Superior Court, where Anthropic's arguments remain open: that a browsewrap cannot bind it, that the trespass allegations can be disproved, and that Reddit never promised its users protection from third-party downloads. What the order settles is the ground on which those arguments will be heard.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Reddit, Inc., represented by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, and Anthropic PBC, represented by Morrison & Foerster, before US District Judge Trina L. Thompson of the Northern District of California, who took over the case after Judge Susan Illston's recusal.

What: The court granted Reddit's motion to remand, holding that none of its five state law claims (breach of contract, unjust enrichment, trespass to chattels, tortious interference with contract and unfair competition) is preempted by the Copyright Act, because each rests on an extra element: contractual limits on the method and purpose of access, technical trespass, interference with privacy obligations to users, or alleged misrepresentations.

When: Anthropic removed the case on July 3, 2025; the motion was argued on March 24, 2026; the order was signed on March 28 and entered on March 30, 2026; the hearing transcript was filed on April 2 and released from restriction on July 1, 2026.

Where: The US District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco, case 3:25-cv-05643-TLT, which returned the dispute to San Francisco County Superior Court, case CGC-25-625892.

Why: Keeping the claims out of copyright removes the fair use framework that shaped the AI training rulings of 2025 and puts the dispute on terms of use, robots.txt parameters, deletion interfaces and public compliance statements, the tools platforms and publishers rely on to price and police access to their content.