Selling the hive mind

In February 2024, days before its IPO, Reddit signed a content-licensing deal with Google reported at roughly $60 million per year, giving Google access via Reddit's Data API to train AI models on years of user content. The deal drew user unease over consent and triggered an FTC inquiry.

In May 2024 Reddit licensed its user-generated content to OpenAI in a deal reportedly worth tens of millions annually, raising conflict-of-interest concerns because OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was Reddit's third-largest shareholder.

As Reddit signed AI data-licensing deals worth over $200 million ahead of its March 2024 IPO, the FTC opened a non-public inquiry into Reddit's sale and licensing of user-generated content to train AI models, amid a broader backlash over monetizing users' posts without compensation or meaningful consent.

Reddit's own transparency reports document persistent spam and inauthentic-account activity. The problem moved from anonymous spammers to credentialed academics in 2025, when University of Zurich researchers secretly ran AI bots posing as real people in r/changemyview to test machine persuasion without users' consent.

Through 2025 Reddit's volunteer moderators warned that a flood of AI-generated 'slop' and rage-bait was overwhelming communities and degrading content quality, even as the company posted record revenue partly built on licensing that same user content to AI firms.

In September 2025 Reddit joined other publishers backing 'Really Simple Licensing', a standard meant to make AI crawlers pay for content — extending Reddit's effort to monetize user-generated posts as AI training data, and its enforcement war against unpaid scrapers.

Reddit sued Anthropic in California state court, alleging the AI company scraped Reddit content without a license to train its Claude models despite publicly claiming it had blocked its bots, with crawlers said to have accessed Reddit more than 100,000 times.

In early 2026 Reddit's stock fell sharply after analysts warned that AI-generated search answers — by reducing the click-throughs that send logged-out visitors to Reddit — could undermine the traffic its advertising business depends on.

As Reddit marketed itself as the human refuge from AI 'slop,' a large-scale academic study found thousands of subreddits writing their own rules against AI-generated content — the number more than doubling in a year — while researchers warned that the platform's 'credibility can look like consensus' and that its volunteer-moderated communities remain vulnerable to brigading and astroturfing.