Reddit Sells Your Posts to Train AI. Here's How to Make It Stop

Reddit sells everything you write. All your comments and post submissions get gobbled up by Google and OpenAI, among others. You have no choice in the matter which is unique because most social media platforms do give you some type of off or opt-out switch if you don't want AI trained on your content. But, not reddit. Reddit says you agreed to this the day you signed up in a small chunk of the user agreement most people have never even laid eyes on. It's in the section called "Your Content":

When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content [...] For example, this license includes the right to use Your Content to train AI and machine learning models.

That's section 5 of the Reddit User Agreement, this is the version that took effect on 1 July 2026. Perpetual, irrevocable, sublicensable. That last word is the one that matters. It's what lets Reddit hand the license on to Google and OpenAI, which it does, for lots of money, and Reddit has been clear that a way to refuse isn't coming anytime soon.

What you can do is delete, and that's more powerful than it sounds. Reddit says its AI customers are required to stop using anything you remove, a condition it states is written into every licensing deal and that almost nobody knows about. The rest of this post covers how far that reaches, where it stops, and the order to do it in so it sticks.

How Reddit Got Here

To its credit, Reddit didn't hide any of this. Perhaps it had no choice as this entire thing happened in a very public way, in a fairly consistent order. Sign the deals, write the policy, then go after everyone who took the data without paying.

1. February 2024Deal

   Google becomes the first paying customer

   A deal reported at about $60 million a year to train Google's models on Reddit content. The same week, Reddit's IPO filing put its signed licensing contracts at $203 million in total.

2. May 2024Policy

   The Public Content Policy, then OpenAI

   Reddit published the Public Content Policy, which says commercial use of public posts now needs a contract. A week later OpenAI signed one.

3. June 2025Lawsuit or block

   Reddit sues Anthropic

   Filed in San Francisco on 4 June 2025, over Claude being trained on Reddit posts without a license. Anthropic moved it to federal court; in March 2026 a judge sent it back to state court, where it's still going.

4. August 2025Lawsuit or block

   The Wayback Machine gets cut off

   Reddit stopped the Internet Archive from crawling anything but its homepage, saying AI companies were pulling posts out of the archive to dodge licensing.

5. October 2025Lawsuit or block

   Reddit sues Perplexity and three scrapers

   Perplexity, SerpApi, Oxylabs and AWMProxy were sued in New York for lifting Reddit content out of Google's search results at what the complaint called industrial scale.

6. July 2026Policy

   The privacy policy adds LLM providers

   A quiet update, effective 1 July 2026, added "LLM providers" to the list of companies Reddit shares your information with, and noted that public content "may also be available in responses provided by an AI chatbot".

Read that list from top to bottom and Reddit's position is pretty obvious. Reddit isn't pro-privacy or against your posts training AI. It's against your posts training AI for free. This is one of those cases that shines a spotlight on the old saying that says if you're not paying for a service or use of a website, you're likely the product. And that's most certainly the case here.

What Your Posts Are Worth to Reddit

Reddit doesn't break licensing out on its own. It sits inside a line called "Other revenue", which is almost entirely licensing. Against the advertising business it's a sliver, but it's a sliver that has grown every quarter, and it's the one you supply.

That's $140 million for 2025, and the most recent quarter, $43 million, was up 24% on the year before. Around 5% of what Reddit brings in, and shrinking as a share only because advertising is growing faster.

Redditors wrote about 2.2 billion posts and comments in the first half of 2025, so call it 4.3 billion for the year. Set that against $140 million and each post or comment earned Reddit roughly three cents. You received none of it, and you can't opt out of the arrangement. You can only remove your part of the inventory.

What you're supplying isn't background noise either. When an AI answer cites a source, that source is more often Reddit than anywhere else. A March 2026 study of 30 million citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Mode put Reddit at number one, ahead of YouTube, LinkedIn and Wikipedia. The share swings a lot with each model update. Semrush watched Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations fall from around 60% to around 10% over six weeks in late 2025. But the direction is the same: something you wrote in a thread years ago is now a candidate for the answer a stranger gets from a chatbot.

There Is No Off Switch

Go through your Reddit settings and you'll find controls for personalised ads, for whether your profile shows up in search engines, and for who can message you. None of them touch licensing. The only privacy setting that matters here is the one the Public Content Policy draws around content in the first place: anything public is in, and private messages, private communities and deleted content are out.

That leaves you with one lever, and it's a real one. Reddit says any licensee with commercial access has to stop using or displaying content once you delete it, that it notifies them "in real-time" through compliance tools it builds into the deals, and that it can cut off a partner it believes is ignoring deletions.

What Deleting Actually Reaches

Deleting removes your posts from Reddit and from the data feed Google, OpenAI and the other AI companies are licensing. It doesn't remove them out of an AI model that was already trained on them, and it also doesn't touch all copies made by scraper sites. In practice that means your posts are out of every future LLM training run and the AI products those companies are running today.

Always edit first, then delete. Scrapers keep whatever version of a comment they saw last. If that was your real comment, that's what they hold on to. If it was just a line of random words, that's what they'll hold. Overwriting also covers you if deleted content ever resurfaces, which happened during the 2023 API protests, when deleted comments came back and overwritten ones came back overwritten.

How the Cleanup Goes, in Order

1. 1

   Get your own user data copy first

   Ask for your data at reddit.com/settings/data-request before you touch anything. It takes up to 30 days to arrive and it's the only complete record you'll have afterwards. It's also useful for step three.

2. 2

   Overwrite everything

   Download Redact for Reddit and connect your account. On the Easy Form, set the action switch to Edit, set the date range to all time, and run it against Posts and Comments. Every item is overwritten with random words plus a Redact tag. Editing is free with no date cap. To keep some communities intact, switch to the Advanced Form and list them under Subreddits to not delete from. Full walkthrough in How to delete all Reddit posts with Redact.

   Action to take

   Editing is more secure - many third-party archival bots will record your comments, but not edits

   EditDelete

   Custom Edit text Premium

   Set a custom message to replace your content

   Removed for privacy

3. 3

   Wait a few weeks, then delete it all

   Flip the switch to Delete and run the same range. Deleting needs Premium. Use Preview to list what matches first, or Review & Delete to approve items one at a time. The filters and modes are covered in How to delete all Reddit posts and comments permanently.

4. 4

   Import your export to reach old comments

   Reddit's listings stop at roughly your last 1,000 comments. Older ones are still public and still licensed. On the Comments tab, enable Import Data Package, pick the zip from step 1, and rerun both passes. Details in How to delete all your Reddit comments.

   Import Data Package

   Drop your Reddit data export into the Comments tab

   reddit-export.zipReaches old comments the Reddit API hides

   Run Deletion

5. 5

   Put it on a schedule

   Turn on Disappearing Mode for Reddit, choose posts, comments and upvotes, and set a preservation window such as 30 days. Anything older is removed automatically on each run. Scheduling needs Premium.

6. 6

   EU or UK: file an objection

   GDPR Article 21 gives you the right to object to processing of your personal data. Submit it through the data request form with the GDPR option, or email redditdatarequests@reddit.com from the address on your account. It won't untrain a model, but it puts Reddit Netherlands B.V. on notice in a way a US user can't.

What This Doesn't Fix

Be honest with yourself about the edges, because they're where people get caught out.

• Models already trained. If your comment went into a training run in 2024, it's in that model. Deleting keeps it out of the next one, which is the best anyone can offer right now.
• Other people quoting you. A reply that quoted your comment is their content, not yours. It stays, and it's licensed.
• Screenshots and reposts. The privacy policy's own wording is that public content may be "reshared by others without permission". Nothing in your account controls that.
• Search snippets. Google's cached copies fall out over weeks, not minutes. The Reddit setting that hides your profile from search engines helps here, but it's separate from licensing.

None of that is a reason to leave the rest up. A profile with nothing readable on it is worth nothing to a licensee, and Reddit has told those licensees, in writing, that they have to let it go.