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Reddit sued Perplexity AI and three data-scraping intermediaries in federal court, alleging an industrial-scale scheme to harvest Reddit content from Google search results to feed AI products in violation of the DMCA.
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.
In June 2025 Reddit sued Anthropic, alleging it scraped Reddit content over 100,000 times to train Claude without a licence; in 2026 a court remanded the state-law claims back to California state court.
In October 2025 Reddit sued Perplexity AI alongside scraping companies Oxylabs, AWMProxy, and SerpApi, alleging an 'industrial-scale' operation to harvest Reddit content from Google results and sell or use it.
At Cannes Lions in June 2025, Reddit launched AI advertising tools under the 'Reddit Community Intelligence' brand, including features that surface users' own posts beneath brand ads and mine community conversations for marketers, reviving debate over monetizing user-generated content.
On 25 July 2025 Reddit began requiring UK users to verify their age with government ID or a face scan to view adult and other 'mature' content, triggering a backlash over privacy and over-blocking of support communities.
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.
A fabricated sexually explicit video of podcast host Bobbi Althoff that went viral on X in February 2024 also spread to Reddit, in an incident driven partly by engagement-farming accounts promising 'leaks.'
Around Taiwan's January 2024 election, Google's threat researchers reported that the pro-Beijing Dragonbridge network flooded platforms — Reddit among them — with pro-PRC and anti-US narratives, including AI-generated material.
Reddit's 'delete' is a soft delete: removed posts and comments vanish from public view but persist in Reddit's systems, in third-party archives that captured them at posting time, and in users' own GDPR data exports — a gap between user expectation and reality that became a documented privacy concern.
Reddit was one of nine companies ordered by the FTC to disclose its data practices for a sweeping 6(b) study; the 2024 staff report found pervasive surveillance of users and weak protections for children and teens across the industry.
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.