Reddit CEO says Microsoft refuses to negotiate with Reddit to scrape its data

On the heels of Reddit rolling out an update that booted Microsoft's Bing from accessing its data, Reddit's CEO has come out slammed Microsoft and other big tech companies for refusing to negotiate.

Reddit pivoted early this year and made major changes to its business, particularly how it handles its API with third parties. Seeing the massive rise in demand for data to train AI models, Reddit altered its API policies and began charging for access to its massive data pool. This change nuked popular third-party Reddit apps that were used by thousands of users. Reddit users caused the platform to go dark after that, but it has seemingly recovered.

These new API changes and Reddit now selling access to its data scored the company a deal with Google, which includes the $60 million a year paycheck for direct access to Reddit's wells of user data. Additionally, Reddit also signed on to OpenAI, which enables Reddit posts to appear in responses from ChatGPT and other AI tools. No specific financials were revealed about the deal.

Recently, Reddit has dropped the boot on any scraping of its data with a new update being rolled out that prohibits all web crawling, or data gathering on its website. Microsoft recognized the change, and as a result, search engines such as Bing, DuckDuckGo, and any other search engine that wasn't paying Reddit was now prohibited from data crawling.

"Without these agreements, we 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," said Huffman

In an interview last week, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said that Microsoft was using Reddit's data to train its AI "without telling us" and that Reddit's data was sold through Bing API to other search engines. Additionally, Huffman said that Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity all refused to negotiate with the platform for access to its data.

"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. "That's their real position."