Reddit’s chief executive officer Steve Huffman didn’t pull any punches with Microsoft in an interview with The Verge. He called out Microsoft and other AI search engines like Anthropic and Perplexity for not paying for the information they take from Reddit, some of which have already been blocked from Huffman’s website.
Reddit has deals in places with companies like Google and OpenAI to receive compensation for using its posts and information. The Verge paraphrased Huffman as saying Microsoft was one of several companies “refusing to negotiate,” but a Reddit spokesperson disputed this characterization. The spokesperson told Engadget that Reddit and Microsoft did attempt to negotiate a solution, but didn’t reach a deal they both agreed on.
“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,” Huffman told The Verge’s deputy editor Alex Heath.
Huffman says if Microsoft and other AI search sites continue to use Reddit’s information without proper compensation, they’ll have to be blocked. He doesn’t want to do that because it’s “a real pain in the ass to block these companies.”
Reddit has started cracking down on search engines that expunge information from its various forms and communities. The website vowed to block unauthorized data scraping in June by updating its Robots Exclusion Protocol (robots.txt) and it’s already prevented Bing from accessing data from Reddit, a fact confirmed by Microsoft’s head of search Jordi Ribas on X.
Earlier this month, a source confirmed to Engadget’s Will Shanklin that Microsoft’s refusal to work with Reddit’s terms of service led to the blocking of Bing. A spokesperson from Reddit also said, “Anyone accessing Reddit content must abide by our policies, including those in place to protect redditors. We are selective about who we work with and trust with large-scale access to Reddit content.”
Update, July 31, 7:40PM ET: This story was updated to include more detail on the talks between Reddit and Microsoft over scraping. A spokesperson for the site claimed that Microsoft and Reddit attempted to make a deal, but their negotiations ended without agreement.
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