Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said that Microsoft and all other companies involved in the development of artificial intelligence must pay if they want to use data from the platform. This was reported by The Verge.
“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.
Huffman directly named three companies that refuse to sign the agreement - Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity. He also noted that blocking these companies' access to Reddit content is problematic.
Earlier, the company updated its robot.txt file, a key element that dictates how data collectors on the Internet can access the site. As a result, AI companies can no longer easily use data from the platform.
In addition, the results from Reddit have stopped appearing in all search engines except Google. This is attributed to the fact that Reddit has entered into an agreement with Google to provide its content for training the tech giant's AI models.
Another company that has agreed to pay is OpenAI, which has already started testing its own search engine, SearchGPT, which will also display results from Reddit.