Two designations are in play, and they constrain different things. An attorneys'-eyes-only tier limits the list of people who may read a document, and Anthropic's proposal would use that list to exclude any Reddit in-house lawyer whose work touches AI models, machine learning, licensing, data acquisition, partnerships, product development or related business strategy, according to Reddit's description of the proposal [7]. Source-code treatment limits the room instead. Reddit's own account of the effect is a throughput argument: review in a controlled inspection environment, with printing possibly limited, which makes larger groups of records harder to examine and use in the case [16]. That constraint bites the same way whichever view of competition the court takes.
The identifier dispute is the one with an engineering claim inside it. Anthropic says some identifiers can reveal proprietary training-data processing methods, and that a dataset's name can encode the steps used to assemble or transform training material [15]. Pipelines do get named after what they do. If a naming convention also records the order of the stages, a file listing is a partial schematic with no code in it. For inspection-room handling to be the proportionate answer, reading the names would have to substitute for reading the code. Reddit's reply argues from category: these strings are not source code, and the attorneys'-eyes-only tier already covers them [16].
Anthropic's exclusion list is written in job functions rather than products [7], which is why Reddit's rebuttal does not meet it squarely. Reddit describes its AI development as internal tools built to improve its discussion platform, distinct from selling a public foundation model to Anthropic's customers [9]. Both descriptions can hold at once. A lawyer advising on data acquisition does not need an employer with a competing model for another firm's data-acquisition records to be useful, and Anthropic's stated worry is that channel: information about its models, training systems and operations reaching people involved in competitive decisions [8]. Reddit's answer is that the order already confines the material to the lawsuit and subjects anyone who misuses it to the court's authority [11].
The 50 percent figure comes out of a small team. Reddit says its in-house litigation group is three attorneys [10]. Exclude one, and two absorb what three were carrying: 3 divided by 2 is 1.5 [19]. Arithmetic that lands the same way whether or not the third lawyer was busy. It argues staffing burden without addressing what is discoverable.
One limit worth stating: every detail here about Anthropic's proposed language reaches the record through Reddit's characterization of it [7], and nothing in the case record indicates how Judge Quinn is inclined [3]. The artifact that outlasts the hearing is the signed order [4], because the definitions it fixes for competitor-adjacent counsel, for eligible academic experts [12][13], and for what counts as source code will be the text the next training-data plaintiff inherits [18].
