Reddit is shutting down most of its AI scraping deal

Reddit is killing the bulk of its licensing deal with Perplexity AI. The company said the arrangement has "not lived up to our expectations" and is moving to terminate it.

The deal was worth about $20 million a year and covered Reddit's full content library. Perplexity used it to pull posts, comments, and images for its search engine. Reddit now wants that access gone, though it's keeping a separate deal with OpenAI for ChatGPT and GPT-4o — a deal worth $60 million a year that's running until 2027.

The split is a signal. Reddit's content is the kind of unfiltered, opinionated stuff that makes AI training data feel real, and companies have been racing to buy it. But the economics and the user pushback are getting complicated. Reddit's been warning for a while that its content is being scraped by AI without compensation or control, and this deal was supposed to fix that. It didn't.

Why this matters for us: when platforms start taking back their content, it changes what's free to train on — and the people whose voices end up in those models are the first to lose.