Reddit CEO Steve Huffman took aim at Microsoft and other Al companies for using Reddit data for model training without consent.
Microsoft and other Al companies have been under fire from Reddit CEO Steve Huffman for exploiting Reddit’s data to train their artificial intelligence models without either consent or payment. Huffman called efforts to prohibit these corporations “a real pain in the ass” in a recent interview. “We’ve had Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity act as though all of the content on the internet is free for them to use,” Huffman stated. In particular, he attacked Microsoft for training its AI to summarize information in Bing search results “without telling us” using Reddit’s data.
Huffman clarified the reason for blocking these businesses: “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.” Reddit modified its robots.txt file at the beginning of July to prevent web crawlers from targeting businesses without agreements. As a result, Reddit results were still viewable on Google but vanished from Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
The conventional value exchange between content platforms and search engines has changed, according to Huffman. “When it was used for simple search, to create simple links that would send us traffic from search engines, that was fine,” he stated to Bloomberg. “But now folks are using Reddit data for training; they’re reselling it; they’re doing search summaries instead of linking to us.”
He went on to say, “I believe that the traditional value exchange from search engines has changed,” in an interview with The Verge. The value exchange of crawling for traffic return is increasingly muddy as search, summarization, and training merge.” Reddit has already reached agreements with OpenAl and Google that let them pay to access its data. It is said that Google agreed to pay $60 million a year for this access. Reddit appears to be inaccessible to Microsoft’s Bing and other search engines, so they are unable to display the result in their search results.
According to Jordi Ribas, Microsoft’s head of search, “Reddit has blocked Bing from crawling their site for search, favoring another search engine and impacting competition from Bing and Bing-powered engines.” Ribas made this response on social media platform X. A Microsoft representative clarified, however, that the corporation complies with website guidelines for the use of content for Al models. The CEO of Reddit cited OpenAI’s recent SearchGPT announcement as an example of what future agreements could look like. A representative for Reddit, Tim Rathschmidt, made it clear that none of the site’s current content agreements are exclusive. Microsoft and Perplexity remained silent on the issue, despite Anthropic telling the Verge that Reddit has been blocked from web crawling since mid-May.
Huffman’s position makes it apparent that the days of freely downloading web content for Al training might be drawing to an end. “The traditional value exchange from search engines has changed,” he said.
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