Reddit secures content licensing deal with unnamed AI company

Reddit has reached a deal enabling a yet unknown AI company to train its models on the content of the website, according to an article published by Bloomberg on Friday. 

This deal comes as the social media network approaches the launch of its initial public offering (IPO), which may take place as early as next month. Reddit initially revealed the deal, which is reported to be worth $60 million a year, earlier in 2024 to potential investors of an anticipated IPO, Bloomberg said.

If the reported deal goes through, the content posted on Reddit will be used to train the AI models that produce text, still images, and video in the future.

Reddit has historically been a significant source of training data for huge language models and AI picture generators, even in the absence of the agreement, according to experts. But, until recently, the majority of AI companies trained their data without authorisation on the public internet, a practice that has been shown to be legally questionable. The $60 million deal represents a significant increase over the $5 million yearly payment that OpenAI has supposedly been making to news publishers for their data.

This news follows previous announcements regarding Reddit’s plans to charge fees for API access starting in April 2023, aiming to monetize interactions between businesses and community members within different topic areas represented on the platform. There were concerns raised by some users who felt negatively impacted by certain policy shifts made by Reddit during this period, leading to protests and technical difficulties affecting the service.