Reddit data API for AI: building datasets the right way

The Reddit Data API does not license Reddit content for AI training. Its terms grant no right to use User Content "for training a machine learning or AI model, without the express permission of rightsholders," and Reddit's developer help says model training needs "explicit consent from Reddit." Companies that train on Reddit at scale, such as Google and OpenAI, got access through licensing deals. Researchers have one authorized route, Reddit for Researchers.

If you're building a Reddit dataset for an AI project, doing it "the right way" means working out which of those routes applies to you before you collect anything. This post quotes the terms with links, covers what's been reported about the licensing deals, explains what you owe users on privacy and deletion, and lists the options that exist for research. It's not legal advice. Read the terms for your own use case, and talk to a lawyer if money or a model depends on the answer. All sources were checked on 2026-10-14.

What the Reddit Data API terms say about AI

Three documents govern the Reddit Data API: the Data API Terms (effective June 19, 2023, last revised July 20, 2026), the Developer Terms, and Reddit's help pages for developers.

Training is not licensed

Section 2.4 of the Data API Terms grants a limited license to "copy and display the User Content using the Data API solely as necessary to develop, deploy, distribute, and run your App to your App Users." It then adds: "no other rights or licenses are granted or implied, including any right to use User Content for other purposes, such as for training a machine learning or AI model, without the express permission of rightsholders in the applicable User Content."

Section 3.2 says the same thing as a restriction. You must not use the Data APIs for "violation of third party rights (including using User Content to train a machine learning or AI model without the express permission of rightsholders in the applicable User Content)."

Reddit's developer help page, Developer Platform & Accessing Reddit Data, asks "Can I use content on Reddit to build a large language / AI model?" and answers: "No. You may not use content on Reddit as an input for any model training without explicit consent from Reddit. Commercial use of any model trained with Reddit data is prohibited without explicit approval."

Commercial use needs a contract

The same help page says: "You cannot use any Reddit developer tools and services for commercial purposes without first getting our permission." Its examples of commercial purposes include "Services, research, or data access for fees," "Subscription services" and "Selling access to models trained on Reddit data." The Data API Terms require "a separate agreement with Reddit" for "commercial purposes, research in excess of rate limits, or for any use that is not expressly permitted," and say Reddit "reserves the right to charge fees."

Derived models are in scope when access ends

One clause is easy to miss. If your access ends, you must "delete any cached or stored User Content and Materials" obtained through the Data APIs. The Terms add: "This includes any data or models that were derived from User Content and Materials that were accessed from the Data APIs or our other Services." A model trained on Data API content can therefore fall under the deletion requirement.

The licensing deals: how Google and OpenAI got access

Reddit does license its data, through contracts.

• On February 22, 2024, Google announced that it "now has access to Reddit's Data API," giving it "enhanced signals that will help us better understand Reddit content and display, train on, and otherwise use it." Reuters, citing anonymous sources, put the deal at about $60 million a year. The Next Web repeated that figure as "reportedly" in 2026 (TNW). Neither company confirmed it.
• OpenAI followed on May 16, 2024. Reddit's announcement says "OpenAI will access Reddit's Data API, which provides real-time, structured, and unique content from Reddit," to bring Reddit content to ChatGPT. The same post says the partnership "does not change Reddit's Data API Terms or Developer Terms, which state content accessed through Reddit's Data API cannot be used for commercial purposes without Reddit's approval." No financial terms were published.
• The Google deal now comes up for renewal. The Next Web, citing the Wall Street Journal, reported on July 23, 2026 that Reddit "has discussed cutting off Google's access to its content for AI" as the 2024 deal nears its end. As of 2026-10-14 we found no announced outcome.

Reddit has also sued over unlicensed use. On June 4, 2025, it filed suit against Anthropic in San Francisco, alleging Anthropic "intentionally trained on the personal data of Reddit users without ever requesting their consent" (AP via ABC7). Our post on why AI can't read Reddit and X covers that case and X's similar rules.

Who Reddit licenses to, and what licensees can't do

Reddit's Public Content Policy describes the licensing program from the user's side. It names three main kinds of licensee: companies "that help brands monitor trends," "Large language model makers that share our values that not all public data on the open internet is free to use without restraint," and "Researchers trying to better humanity and the open internet."

The policy also lists what Reddit never licenses: "Private messages, private group chats, mod mail, and deleted posts and comments," non-public account information, posts in quarantined or private communities, and browsing or purchasing history.

Licensees agree to restrictions. Among other things, they cannot:

• "Continue to use or display public content deleted by users or Reddit for content policy violations"
• "Access or display sexually explicit content"
• Use public content to "segment, target, or profile users" by health, finances, politics, sexuality, ethnicity, religion and other sensitive traits
• "Perform background checks, extreme vetting, credit or risk insurance analyses, individual profiling, psychographic segmentation, or facial recognition"
• Make public content available "for surveillance, intelligence, or other law enforcement purposes"

If your use falls outside a formal license, the list still works as a checklist of what Reddit considers misuse.

Privacy and deletion: what you owe users

Whatever route you take, deletion is the obligation teams most often miss. Reddit's Data API Wiki says:

• "You must remove any user content in your possession that has been deleted from Reddit."
• When a post or comment is deleted, you must delete "all content related to the post and/or comment (e.g., title, body, embedded URLs, etc.)."
• When an account is deleted, you must delete its user ID and "all references to the author-identifying information" on its posts and comments.
• "To best comply with this policy, we strongly recommend routinely deleting any stored user data and content within 48 hours."
• Keeping content and data that has been deleted, "even if disassociated, de-identified or anonymized," is "a violation of our terms and policies."

The last line is the one that matters for datasets. Anonymizing a dump does not make deleted content safe to keep, and a one-off scrape saved to disk falls out of compliance as soon as its authors start deleting.

What deleted content looks like in practice

When a comment is deleted, Reddit keeps its slot so the replies under it still make sense. The author and body are gone. This thread was pulled with ChatterAPI's reddit.thread endpoint and recorded with a test key, which returns a real sample for free:

curl "https://api.chatterapi.com/v1/reddit/threads/1wdihhj" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CHATTERAPI_KEY"

{
  "data": {
    "post": { "id": "1wdihhj", "title": "What CRM should a small business use?", "numComments": 186 },
    "comments": [
      {
        "id": "p962kyb",
        "parentId": null,
        "author": "",
        "body": "",
        "score": 5,
        "createdAt": "2026-09-11T14:59:43.000Z"
      }
    ],
    "reportedCommentCount": 186
  },
  "page": { "nextCursor": null, "hasMore": false },
  "credits": { "charged": 0, "remaining": 719 }
}

In this sample, four of the 101 comments came back like this, with empty author and body, and six replies still hang off them. A live call costs 3 credits.

If your application stores Reddit content for search, monitoring or an agent's memory, build the sweep in from day one:

import os, sqlite3, requests

API = "https://api.chatterapi.com/v1"
H = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['CHATTERAPI_KEY']}"}
db = sqlite3.connect("app.db")   # table comments(id, post_id, author, body, fetched_at)

def sweep(post_id):
    """Re-fetch a thread and drop anything that was deleted since we stored it."""
    body = requests.get(f"{API}/reddit/threads/{post_id}", headers=H, timeout=60).json()
    live = {c["id"]: c for c in body["data"]["comments"]}
    stored = [row[0] for row in db.execute("SELECT id FROM comments WHERE post_id=?", (post_id,))]
    gone = [cid for cid in stored if cid in live and not (live[cid]["author"] and live[cid]["body"])]
    db.executemany("DELETE FROM comments WHERE id=?", [(cid,) for cid in gone])
    db.commit()
    return len(gone)

Two notes. First, large threads don't load every comment on one page, so a comment missing from the response isn't necessarily deleted. The sweep only deletes rows that came back as empty placeholders, and on big threads you should page through nextCursor. Second, run it on a schedule. Reddit recommends 48 hours, so a daily sweep of everything you keep is a sensible default.

Research: the authorized route and the reality

Reddit is strict with academics. Its developer help page says: "The only official and authorized avenue for performing research using Reddit data is through the Reddit For Researchers (RFR) program. Using developer tools, APIs, or unauthorized third-party tools for academic research is a violation of our policies." To apply, eligible researchers file a support ticket linked from that page.

Researchers report that the route is hard to get through. A grad student in r/redditdev wrote that they "Applied for Reddit API access weeks ago - complete radio silence," and asked why "public data is being gatekept this hard while commercial scrapers operate freely" (thread). Another researcher posted the rejection they got from Reddit, which called the request "not in compliance with Reddit's Responsible Builder Policy and/or lacks necessary details" and didn't say what was missing (thread).

People replying in those threads suggest old torrent archives of Reddit dumps and third-party services. Both carry risk. Reddit's help page names unauthorized third-party tools as a policy violation for research. An old archive also can't honor deletions made after it was created, which conflicts with the deletion rules above. If you're at a university, ask your research data or ethics office whether your institution already has an agreement, then apply to Reddit for Researchers with a specific, well-documented proposal.

Where ChatterAPI fits, and where it doesn't

ChatterAPI is a third-party API that reads public Reddit and X data for applications such as search, monitoring, lead finding, and agents that look things up while they work. It is independent and not affiliated with Reddit, Inc. or X Corp.

What it can't do:

• ChatterAPI is not a licensed training-data source. Using it gives you no rights to Reddit or X content and no permission to train models on it.
• It doesn't replace a Reddit data license for commercial training, or Reddit for Researchers for academic work.
• Reddit's help page says unauthorized third-party tools are off-limits for academic research. That includes us.
• On Reddit it is read-only. The Reddit API shutdown timeline covers how Reddit is narrowing public access through 2027.

Check each platform's terms for your use case before you build. For an agent that reads Reddit and X at query time, our guide to AI agents and Reddit and X data shows the setup, and the Reddit MCP server guide covers connecting Claude, Cursor or Codex.

The case for Reddit's position, and against it

It's easy to read all of this as Reddit protecting a revenue line, and partly it is. Reddit said in its OpenAI announcement that commercial use needs its approval, and the Google deal was reported at $60 million a year. There's also a privacy argument. People posted to talk to other people, not to train a model, and the deletion rules exist so that removing a comment actually removes it. The Public Content Policy's ban on profiling, background checks and surveillance protects users as well as Reddit.

The other side has a point too. Reddit content already shaped today's models. Kawin Ethayarajh, in a thread tracing how Reddit data was used to train language models, put it this way: "It's not a coincidence that LLMs have 'Reddit voice'" (post). And as the r/redditdev threads show, locking out researchers while licensing to the largest AI companies looks lopsided from the outside. Both things can be true. If you're building today, the terms are clear, the deals are private, and checking compliance is your job.

Try it

ChatterAPI gives your code and your agents Reddit and X data through one key, over REST or MCP, for applications that read public data. Sign up with Google to get 100 free credits with no card, then run the thread call above against a discussion you care about. Plans start at $19 a month for 25,000 credits.