Reddit’s CEO is slamming Microsoft, AI startups for data scraping

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is tired of AI companies scraping the social media platform’s posts for data to train their latest AI models.

In an interview with The Verge, the executive said, “We’ve had Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity act as though all of the content on the internet is free for them to use.”

“It has been a real pain in the ass to block these companies,” he added.

Huffman’s comments come just a week after reports that Reddit posts were only surfacing on Google’s search engine, not Microsoft’s Bing, DuckDuckGo, or other alternatives. Reddit in February struck a $60 million-per-year licensing deal with Google, which allows the tech giant to train its AI on Reddit users’ posts. The Verge reported in June that Reddit updated its site to block companies that haven’t made such agreements from crawling the posts. Reddit does not have deals with Microsoft or AI upstarts Anthropic and Perplexity.

Microsoft and Anthropic staffers have reportedly confirmed that they’ve been blocked from crawling Reddit for data.

As Matthew McConaughey says in ads for Salesforce, “data is the new gold” in the age of rapidly evolving AI. Chatbot developers have looked to the far reaches of the internet for free text, images, videos, and code to teach its software to act like humans. But their undiscerning appetite for free data has put them in the crosshairs of lawsuits from authors, artists, and newspapers.

Huffman told the Verge, “[W]e don’t have any say or knowledge of how our data is displayed and what it’s used for, which has put us in a position now of blocking folks who haven’t been willing to come to terms with how we’d like our data to be used or not used.” 

But Reddit’s punishment of Microsoft poses a problem: It furthers Google’s dominance of the search market right as that dominance is under major regulatory scrutiny. Jordi Ribas, Microsoft’s head of search, said in a post on X that Reddit is “favoring another search engine and impacting competition from Bing and Bing-powered engines.”