Reddit CEO Steve Huffman stands on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange at Reddit’s IPO a year ago (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Its AI licensing business made up less than 10% of the company’s total revenue last quarter.
Reddit’s licensing deals with Google and OpenAI are great, but using that data for itself is even better, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said at Deutsche Bank’s Media, Internet & Telecom Conference this week.
Here’s Huffman during a fireside chat:
“We did a couple of deals last year — one with Google, one with OpenAI — licensing our corpus for training for their LLMs. And then we also started investing in our own work to kind of reveal the value of that corpus. And that’s where our head is at right now. So this is search. This is Reddit Answers. This is training our own models.”
These deals, where tech companies like Google pay Reddit tens of millions of dollars a year to license its trove of conversations in order to train their large language models, made up less than 9% of the company’s total revenue last year. (The AI business is buried in “other” revenue.) The vast majority of its revenue comes from advertising.
Huffman said Reddit of course is still “open and open for business” when it comes to these licensing deals — it’s basically free money, after all — and will “see where this goes.” But using that data itself is really the main event:
“What I know for sure is that there is an incredible amount of value there. And I think we’re actually in the best position to kind of capture it.”
Huffman also seemed to be playing down the idea that Reddit and Google have become frenemies after Reddit blamed a tweak to Google’s search algorithm for its disappointing growth in daily active users last quarter, and after Reddit has launched its own Google-like services. Huffman says he thinks the company can reach a billion daily active users irrespective of Google’s algorithm.
“Big picture, our relationship with Google is great. We collaborate with them. On the search side, obviously, we have a ton of content in their index that makes their search product better.
It’s an amazing channel for us. Particularly, those logged out users coming from Google, though it’s volatile, it’s a great opportunity for us to teach internet consumers broadly that Reddit has the answer to their questions. It also happens to be our least valuable cohort of users from a monetization point of view, so it doesn’t really affect revenue. That’s why you didn’t see any revenue movement related to anything that Google does.
And then we collaborate with Google on the AI side. They’re a customer for our data. We’re a big cloud customer. We’re mutual advertisers. We collaborate on safety. It’s a really deep and healthy partnership.”
“Google” was mentioned 35 times in the conversation, mostly by the Reddit CEO.
While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.
According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.
While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.
According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.
Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.
The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.
Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.
This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.
Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.
Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.
The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.
Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.
This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.
Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.
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