Reddit CEO calls out Microsoft, others for scraping site without permission: report

Reddit (NYSE:RDDT) CEO Steve Huffman called out Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Anthropic and Perplexity for scraping his site’s data without permission, in an interview with The Verge.

Huffman said Microsoft, Anthropic and Perplexity have all used Reddit’s data to train their artificial intelligence models, according to the report.

“We’ve had Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity act as though all of the content on the internet is free for them to use,” Huffman said in the interview. “That’s their real position.”

Other tech companies have established deals with Reddit before scraping data. Google (GOOG)(GOOGL) reached a deal with Reddit early this year that allowed access to its content to train the search giant’s AI models. The contract was worth approximately $60M per year.

OpenAI also entered into an agreement with Reddit in March, which allows ChatGPT to learn from Reddit content in real time.

“Reddit has become one of the internet’s largest open archives of authentic, relevant, and always up-to-date human conversations about anything and everything,” said Huffman.

Reddit was up 3.6% shortly before markets closed on Wednesday.