Reddit Seeks to Strike Next AI Content Pact with Google, OpenAI (www.bloomberg.com)

Reddit is reportedly negotiating new licensing deals with major AI players including Google and OpenAI to govern how their vast corpus of user-generated posts and comments can be used to train large language models. The move follows broader industry pressure and earlier disputes over whether public web content can be ingested without explicit permission or compensation. Reddit’s talks aim to convert its conversational data — a highly valuable source for dialogue, cultural context, and informal language — into a monetizable asset while giving the company and its moderators more control over downstream uses. For the AI/ML community, a negotiated agreement would be a milestone in shaping data provenance, legal clarity, and business models for model training. Key technical implications include negotiated scopes of access (which subreddits, time ranges, or media types), allowed usages (pretraining vs. fine-tuning vs. embeddings), requirements for de-identification, opt-out mechanisms, and auditing or rate-limiting of crawlers and APIs. Such terms could influence training set composition and model behavior (biases, topical coverage, and citation practices), set precedents for compensating platforms and creators, and affect how research and commercial teams source conversational data going forward.