Reddit partners with OpenAI on data licensing

On May 16, 2024, Reddit and OpenAI announced a partnership giving OpenAI access to Reddit's real-time, structured content through its Data API so that ChatGPT and other OpenAI products could better surface and reference recent Reddit posts and discussions. Reported to be worth roughly $70 million a year, the deal also made OpenAI a Reddit advertising partner and committed the two companies to building unspecified AI-powered features for Reddit users and moderators. OpenAI said the agreement was led by COO Brad Lightcap and approved by its independent board, with Sam Altman, a Reddit shareholder, recusing himself.

Coming just months after the Google licensing deal and weeks after Reddit's IPO, the OpenAI partnership cemented data licensing as a core, recurring revenue stream and reinforced Reddit's positioning as a premium source of human-written content for AI training. It also tightened the link between Reddit's commercial strategy and the generative-AI boom, even as some users questioned the monetization of their unpaid contributions. The arrangement later fed into Reddit's own AI search ambitions and shaped how it policed unauthorized scraping by other firms.