Does Reddit sell your data to AI? The license, the deals, and what deleting does

The Morse teamPublished October 29, 202611 min read

As of October 2026, Reddit licenses the public posts and comments you write to AI companies, including Google and OpenAI, and its User Agreement says your license to Reddit "includes the right to use Your Content to train AI and machine learning models" (Reddit User Agreement). Reddit's Privacy Policy says it doesn't sell your personal data (Reddit Privacy Policy). Its Public Content Policy says it never licenses private messages, private group chats, modmail, or deleted posts and comments (Reddit Public Content Policy). Neither policy offers a setting that keeps a public post out of the deals. Deleting a post takes it out of licensing from then on, but deleting your account leaves every post you didn't delete first still up.

We read Reddit's User Agreement (effective July 1, 2026) and three earlier versions, its Privacy Policy (effective July 1, 2026), its Public Content Policy (updated October 6, 2026), its Data API Terms and Developer Terms, its announcements of the Google and OpenAI deals, its SEC filings, and the court filings in its lawsuits against Anthropic and Perplexity, all on October 29, 2026. We read the Privacy Policy and the Public Content Policy in the Internet Archive's copies from October 29 and October 21, 2026. Claims in the lawsuits are allegations unless a court has ruled on them. Reddit deserves credit for its Public Content Policy, which lists in plain words what it never licenses and what licensees may not do with your posts, from surveillance to background checks.

Reddit and AI training: the key facts

Read October 29, 2026.

The Privacy Policy's only switch for sharing data with partners is for advertising, and it doesn't reach licensing.

Does Reddit sell your data, or license it?

Reddit charges for access to public content and calls it licensing. Its Privacy Policy says "We don't sell your personal data to third parties, including data brokers" (Reddit). The same policy says Reddit requires third parties "to pay licensing fees for access to larger quantities of content and information." Its Public Content Policy says Reddit "may license public content for commercial or non-commercial use" (Reddit).

Under the User Agreement, posting gives Reddit "a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license" to your content and to "any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with" it (Reddit). The section granting it, section 5, is on the list of sections that "survive any termination of these Terms or of your Account."

The money shows up in Reddit's filings. Reddit reports licensing under "Other revenue," which its 2025 annual report says "consists of revenue from content licensing and products sold directly to users" (Reddit 10-K). That line grew from $15.2 million in 2023 to $114.7 million in 2024 and $140.0 million in 2025. For April through June 2026, it was $43.3 million (Reddit 10-Q). The same 10-Q puts $92.1 million in contracted future revenue, "primarily of long-term content licensing contracts," with $30.1 million of it due in 2027.

What are Reddit's deals with Google and OpenAI?

Both give the AI company access to Reddit's Data API, and only Google's announcement mentions training. Reddit announced the Google deal on February 22, 2024, saying it lets Google "use the Reddit Data API to improve its products and services – including supporting new ways to display Reddit content and providing more efficient ways to train models" (Reddit).

Reddit announced the OpenAI deal on May 16, 2024 (Reddit). Under it, OpenAI brings Reddit content "to ChatGPT and new products" through the Data API, Reddit builds AI features "on OpenAI's platform of AI models," and OpenAI becomes "a Reddit advertising partner." That announcement doesn't use the word "train."

Neither announcement names a price. Reddit's IPO filing gives only a total for the deals it signed in January 2024: "an aggregate contract value of $203.0 million and terms ranging from two to three years," delivered through "continuous access to our data API as well as quarterly transfers of Reddit data" (Reddit S-1).

As of October 29, 2026, Reddit's newsroom lists no AI licensing deal announced since OpenAI's. Its 2025 annual report says it continues to "strategically explore content licensing agreements" with partners from "marketing intelligence and enterprise-scale technology companies to specialized providers in the financial services industry" (Reddit 10-K).

When did Reddit start licensing your posts for AI?

Reddit's IPO filing dates its licensing deals to January 2024, and its terms named AI training only from September 2024. The User Agreement in force when the Google deal was announced, effective February 15, 2024, already let Reddit make your content available to "other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit," and said nothing about AI (Reddit). The sentence about training AI first appears in the version effective September 16, 2024 (Reddit). Reddit added the AI wording seven months after it announced the Google deal.

Reddit's own AI uses your posts too. Reddit Answers launched as an AI-powered way to get answers "from real conversations and communities across all of Reddit," and since May 26, 2026 it has been part of Reddit search (Reddit).

Can you opt out of Reddit AI training?

Not for anything you post publicly. Reddit's Privacy Policy lists choices for ads, analytics, emails, and your rights by region, and none of them covers licensing or AI training (Reddit). The Public Content Policy offers three ways to make content "non-public": post in private communities, which are "excluded from our data licensing arrangements," delete posts and comments, or delete your account (Reddit).

Does deleting your Reddit account remove your posts from AI training?

No. Deleting your account removes your name from your posts and leaves the posts up. Reddit's Privacy Policy says the posts, comments, and messages you submitted "will still be visible to others unless you first delete the specific content" (Reddit). The Public Content Policy calls account deletion a way to "disassociate your Reddit account from public content" (Reddit).

Deleting posts one by one does more. The Public Content Policy says Reddit requires licensees "to stop using deleted posts and comments" and gives them "compliance tools to help automate public content deletions." Reddit's Developer Terms tell apps using its data to delete content a user deletes "as soon as possible" (Reddit). Reddit also says it "cannot guarantee that third parties have deleted copies of Reddit public content they've made without your or our permission" (Reddit).

None of these pages says what happens to a model already trained on a post before you deleted it. The closest is Reddit's standard Data API Terms, which require a developer whose access ends to delete stored content, including "any data or models that were derived from User Content" (Reddit). Reddit hasn't published its contracts with Google or OpenAI, so we can't tell you whether they say the same.

Does Reddit use your DMs and chats for AI?

Reddit says it never licenses them. The Public Content Policy puts "private messages, private group chats, mod mail, and deleted posts and comments" on its list of private data it doesn't license or make public (Reddit). Messages in a public chat channel are different, because the Privacy Policy counts "public posts, comments, and chat messages" as public content (Reddit).

Reddit's own use of private messages is less clear. The Privacy Policy lists non-public content, private messages included, among the information it uses to "provide, maintain, and improve the Services." It doesn't say whether that includes training Reddit's own AI features.

What is Reddit suing Anthropic and Perplexity over?

Scraping, in both cases, and every claim in them is an allegation. Reddit sued Anthropic in San Francisco Superior Court in June 2025, for breach of contract, unjust enrichment, trespass to chattels, tortious interference, and unfair competition (order). Reddit alleges that Anthropic scraped Reddit "to train and commercialize its AI chatbot, Claude." It also alleges that after an Anthropic spokesperson denied it was still crawling, Anthropic's bots reached the site "more than one hundred thousand times." Reddit says Anthropic bypassed "technical measures such as the Compliance API for data deletions," the tool licensees use to drop deleted posts. Anthropic moved the case to federal court, and on March 28, 2026, Judge Trina L. Thompson sent it back, finding that none of Reddit's claims is equivalent to a copyright claim. She didn't decide whether they're true. We couldn't read the state court's docket, so we can't report what has happened there since. For what Anthropic does with your own chats, see is Claude private.

Reddit sued SerpApi, Oxylabs, AWMProxy, and Perplexity in federal court in Manhattan on October 22, 2025 (complaint). Reddit alleges the first three scrape Reddit posts from Google's search results, and that Perplexity is "a willing customer of at least one" of them. Reddit says it made a "test post" that only Google's search engine could crawl, and that "within hours" Perplexity's answer engine produced its contents. The complaint says OpenAI and Google, by contrast, have entered "agreements permitting them to access Reddit data." On July 31, 2026, Judge Paul A. Engelmayer "predominantly" denied SerpApi's and Perplexity's motions to dismiss, keeping claims under the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules and a civil conspiracy claim, and dismissing the unjust enrichment and unfair competition claims (opinion). SerpApi answered on August 28, 2026 with antitrust counterclaims, alleging that Reddit monopolizes its users' content and charges "supra-competitive prices" for access (SerpApi's answer). Our page on whether Perplexity is private covers what it keeps from your own searches.

How Morse keeps your questions out of anyone's dataset

Every answer above comes back to Reddit's license. A public post is public content, Reddit holds a "perpetual, irrevocable" license to it that outlives your account, and its licensing deals rest on that license. Many Reddit posts are questions people would rather not have asked in public: a symptom, a landlord, a boss, a debt. A throwaway account hides your name, but the question itself still becomes public content.

Morse is a place to ask those questions without posting them. Morse doesn't train AI on your content, sell your data, or show ads, and it uses no advertising trackers or third-party analytics (Morse privacy policy). Your chat history is stored in your browser, encrypted, and Morse's servers don't keep your messages or log what you write. There's no training switch to find. Clearing your browser or deleting your account removes your history for good, and Morse can't recover it, so copy anything you want to keep.

Each chat runs in the privacy mode you pick:

• Private, for the question you'd otherwise post to a subreddit. Every new chat starts here. Open-weight models like DeepSeek, Kimi, and GLM, plus xAI's Grok, run under Morse's zero data retention agreements with its inference, search, and other providers, which agreed to keep nothing. Where a provider confirms zero retention on each reply, Morse checks it and refuses a reply that doesn't.
• E2EE, for the story you wouldn't post even from a throwaway. Your browser checks the enclave's hardware attestation, then encrypts the message so only that enclave can read it, and Morse's servers relay text they can't read. The guarantee depends on the enclave hardware and attestation working as designed, and E2EE comes with Pro.
• Anonymous, for asking GPT, Claude, or Gemini without your name on it. Morse's proxy removes your account, email, and IP address and sends the message under Morse's own account. The provider sees the message without knowing it's you, and may keep it for a limited time to check for abuse, under its own policy, so leave out details that point to you.

Signing out locks your history, and unlocking it takes two keys: one that never leaves your device, and one Morse's server gives you when you sign in. Because Morse doesn't store chats, it usually has very little to give authorities. For how the big chat apps handle training, see which AI companies train on your data.

What to do on Reddit today:

• Posts you don't want licensed: delete them one at a time. Licensees must stop using deleted posts, though no Reddit page says what happens to a model already trained on them.
• Leaving Reddit: delete your posts and comments first, then the account.
• New posts on sensitive topics: post in a private community, which Reddit excludes from licensing.
• In the EEA, the UK, or Switzerland: use the Privacy Policy's rights to object and to erasure as well.
• Questions you'd rather not publish: ask them in a Morse chat instead.

Ask the question you were about to post from the Morse home page, no account needed, or start free with no card. E2EE chats come with Pro, at $19 a month.