After cutting separate deals with Google and OpenAI earlier this year to allow them to use content from its website, Reddit now wants Microsoft to come to the negotiating table too.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has called on the Satya Nadella-led tech giant to pay up it if it wants to continue scraping the site’s data.

“Without these agreements, we don’t have any say or knowledge of how our data is displayed and what it’s used for, which has put us in a position now of blocking folks who haven’t been willing to come to terms with how we’d like our data to be used or not used,” Huffman said in an interview this week.

He is believed to have singled out not only Microsoft, but also Anthropic, and Perplexity as companies that are refusing to negotiate with it, adding that it has been “a real pain in the ass to block these companies,” according to The Verge.

“We’ve had Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity act as though all of the content on the internet is free for them to use,” Huffman said. “That’s their real position.”

Reddit has gone on to add measures to block unauthorized use of its content. At the beginning of July, its robots.txt file was updated to block web crawlers it doesn’t have agreements with.

Users then began to notice that Reddit results were only visible in Google results — where Reddit is being paid for its data to be displayed — and not other search engines such as Microsoft’s Bing.

Huffman charged Microsoft with using Reddit’s data to train its AI and summarising its content in Bing results “without telling us” and that Reddit’s data has also been sold through the Bing API to other search engines.

He pointed out to Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s recent comment at a conference that public data on the internet is “freeware.”

In response to Reddit results recently disappearing from Bing, Microsoft’s head of search, Jordi Ribas, said on X that “Reddit has blocked Bing from crawling their site for search, favoring another search engine and impacting competition from Bing and Bing-powered engines.”

In February, a deal between Google and Reddit gave the search engine giant access to Reddit’s data API, which delivers real-time content from Reddit’s platform. This provided “Google with an efficient and structured way to access the vast corpus of existing content on Reddit,” while allowing it to use that information to train its AI models.

In May, Reddit’s other deal with OpenAI allowed the latter to access real-time content from Reddit’s data API, so that it can use that information within its ChatGPT platform and other products too. The partnership benefited Reddit too as not only did OpenAI become an advertising partner on Reddit, but the deal was also positioned as one that would “enable Reddit to bring new AI-powered features to Redditors and mods” and use OpenAI’s large language models to build applications.