Feed: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics
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Title: Reddit is restricting its availability to the Internet Archive's
Wayback Machine

Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2025 17:00:35 +0000
Link: https://www.engadget.com/social-media/reddit-...

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is the latest victim of Reddit's
crackdown on data access. The company has begun to place new restrictions on
what the archive site will be able to access in a move that will
significantly limit the Wayback Machine's ability to preserve information
from Reddit.

With the change, the Wayback Machine, a project run by the nonprofit Internet
Archive, will only be able to crawl Reddit's homepage. It will no longer be
able to access comments, subreddit pages, post details, profiles and other
data.

The move is the latest step Reddit has taken on its quest to limit AI
companies' ability to use its data to train large language models without
paying licensing fees. It's also a notably different stance than the company
took last year, when it explicitly said that it would not limit "good faith
actors," including the Internet Archive. It's not clear what exactly has
changed since then. Reddit seems to believe that AI companies are
circumventing its rules by scraping data via the Wayback Machine. We've
reached out to the Internet Archive for comment.

Data licensing has become a significant business for Reddit. The company has
struck multimillion-dollar deals with OpenAI and Google that allow them to
use Reddit posts to help train their AI models. At the same time, Reddit has
taken an increasingly hardline stance against companies that attempt to use
its data without such arrangements. Earlier this year, the company sued
Anthropic, alleging it scraped Reddit for years without permission.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at
https://www.engadget.com/social-media/reddit-...
to-the-internet-archives-wayback-machine-170035482.html?src=rss

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