ZDNET’s key takeaways
- The Web Archive can now solely crawl Reddit’s homepage.
- Reddit’s objective is to dam AI corporations from scraping Reddit consumer knowledge.
- Publishers (and others) are suing AI firms for copyright infringement.
Reddit is defending its privateness from AI firms which might be taking roundabout approaches to scraping its content material.
The social media platform, often known as a useful resource the place customers can put up anonymously and discover details about just about any topic, will block the Web Archive’s Wayback Machine from indexing its on-line knowledge, in response to a Monday report from The Verge. The transfer is in response to the invention that AI corporations, unable to scrape knowledge from Reddit instantly because of the platform’s prohibitive insurance policies, have as a substitute been retrieving its knowledge from listed content material on the Web Archive and utilizing it to coach fashions.
The Wayback Machine will now solely be capable of scrape knowledge from Reddit’s homepage, in response to The Verge, whereas entry to consumer profiles, feedback, and put up element pages will probably be blocked.
Launched in 1996, the Web Archive is a non-profit that operates an unlimited digital database of internet content material. The archive is maintained partly by the Wayback Machine, a bit of web-crawling software program that gathers internet pages and preserves them as they appeared after they had been collected, like digital flies in amber. This serves as a useful resource for researchers learning the evolution of on-line tradition and digital forensic proof for legislation enforcement, amongst different makes use of.
What Reddit’s transfer means
Reddit has beforehand flagged issues associated to the scraping of its content material with the Web Archive, in response to The Verge. The non-profit was additionally reportedly notified earlier than the web-crawling restrictions began going into impact yesterday.
The Web Archive has but to make an official assertion about the way it plans to answer Reddit’s new restrictions, and on the time of writing, it has not responded to ZDNET’s request for remark. Wayback Machine director Mark Graham, nevertheless, has advised a number of publications that the Web Archive will “proceed to have ongoing discussions about this matter” with Reddit.
Rising rigidity
Reddit’s reported choice to dam Wayback Machine from scraping nearly all of its content material arrives throughout a second of mounting rigidity between AI firms and digital publishers, although Reddit is the primary tech firm to wade into the controversy. The corporate sued Anthropic in June after discovering that the AI firm was illegally scraping its knowledge, however it has additionally beforehand signed licensing offers with each Google and OpenAI.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s mother or father firm, filed an April 2025 lawsuit in opposition to OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in coaching and working its AI techniques.)
AI builders require entry to gargantuan troves of knowledge to coach generative AI fashions, that are designed to determine and replicate refined mathematical patterns gleaned from these coaching datasets.
Lots of these firms have scraped coaching knowledge from publicly out there web sites, together with social media websites and information shops, claiming authorized immunity below an idea recognized in copyright legislation as fair use. (The courts are nonetheless untangling the legitimacy of that argument, and can possible be doing so for a while.)
Most of the organizations whose content material has been copiously scraped — together with a cohort of authors and different artists — have responded with lawsuits.
Others, in the meantime, have signed content material licensing agreements with the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, consenting to the usage of their organizations’ knowledge in trade for elevated visibility within the responses generated by chatbots, or different advantages.
