Reddit CEO Steve Huffman on stage at a Goldman Sachs conference in 2018 (file photo). Image: Steve Jurvetson / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0, cropped
Reddit is closing the last free ways to pull its posts in bulk, and the fight over AI training data is the backdrop. The company announced on Wednesday that it will stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13 and shut down its public API in March 2027, TechCrunch reported, saying RSS has become a “common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse.”
Why AI companies want Reddit’s posts
Reddit holds nearly two decades of people asking questions, arguing, recommending products and explaining things to each other in plain language. That is exactly the kind of human-written text AI models learn from, and it is also what AI search tools and chatbots quote when they answer questions about products, travel or bugs in code.
Reddit has turned that into a business. It signed data licensing deals with Google and OpenAI in 2024, giving them structured access to its content for training and for their products. It has also gone to court against AI companies, including Anthropic and Perplexity, accusing them of taking its content without paying.
The money is growing. In its second-quarter results, Reddit said its “other revenue”, the line outside advertising that includes data licensing, rose 24%% from a year earlier to $43 million.
The free routes are closing
RSS feeds and the public API are how anyone, human or bot, could read Reddit at scale without a deal. Each scraper that pulls posts through them gets for free what Google and OpenAI pay for. Reddit hasn’t named AI companies as the scrapers in its announcement, but the timing and its licensing business make the connection hard to miss.
- RSS feeds stop working on November 13. They let people follow a subreddit, user or search without logging in, and let tools pull new posts automatically.
- The public API shuts down in March 2027. That is the route apps, bots, researchers and AI tools use to read Reddit programmatically. After that, bulk access means a commercial arrangement with Reddit.
That matters for AI products beyond the big labs. Smaller AI assistants, research tools and agents that fetch Reddit threads to answer questions will lose their free way in unless they strike a deal. It also comes as AI agents are hitting websites harder than ever: OpenAI’s own agents broke into Hugging Face while chasing their goals, and publishers from Oxford’s Bodleian Library to authors whose books ended up in pirated collections are fighting over what AI can be trained on.
People who aren’t scrapers pay the price
Many volunteer moderators use RSS to get alerts about new posts in the communities they run. Reddit is steering them to its Discord Relay app, built on its Devvit developer platform, and has asked them to switch before November 13. For everyone else there is no replacement: people who read Reddit in feed readers such as Feedly or Inoreader, and small websites and tools that show Reddit posts, simply lose access.
Reddit acknowledged the loss. “We know RSS has been a beloved part of the open web for a long time, and we’re grateful to everyone who used it to stay connected to Reddit,” it wrote. Early reactions from moderators and RSS fans have been angry. It echoes 2023, when Reddit began charging for its API, which forced apps such as Apollo to close and led thousands of subreddits to go dark in protest.
Why it matters
AI has made human conversation valuable, and the sites that host it are locking it up. Reddit closing its open feeds and free API means its users’ posts will reach AI systems mainly through paid deals, and it shows how the open web is shrinking as AI companies compete for human-written text.
Sources: Reddit announcement (r/modnews), TechCrunch, Reddit Q2 2026 results.
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