Microsoft must pay to search Reddit: CEO Steve Huffman

Microsoft must pay Reddit to search the platform for data to train its AI models, says Reddit CEO Steve Huffman in a recent statement. Huffman, who has already struck deals with OpenAI and Google to allow the use of Reddit data for AI training, now insists that Microsoft follow suit.

In a recent article by The Verge, Huffman talked about the importance of having control and awareness over how Reddit's data is utilised. "Without these agreements, we don't have any say or knowledge of how our data is displayed and what it's used for," says the CEO, adding that anyone outside these agreements has to be blocked by Reddit. He specifically called out Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity for their refusal to negotiate.

Reddit's stance against unauthorised data crawlers has intensified recently. In early July, the platform updated its robots.txt file to prevent web crawlers from companies without agreements from accessing its data. Consequently, Reddit results are now only visible in Google searches, with whom an agreement exists, and are absent from other search engines like Bing, with whom there is no agreement currently.

The article on Verge adds that Huffman accused Microsoft of using Reddit's data without permission to train its AI models and display content summaries in Bing search results. He also alleged that Microsoft has been selling Reddit data through the Bing API to other search engines. The CEO pointed to Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman's recent comment at a conference, which described public data on the internet as "freeware" as reflective of Microsoft's stance.

"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."