Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has publicly urged Microsoft, along with Anthropic and Perplexity, to negotiate payment for using Reddit's data, following similar agreements Reddit established with Google and OpenAI. Huffman accused these companies of treating online content as free for their use, complicating Reddit's ability to control its data's application. As a result, Reddit has updated its robots.txt file to block unauthorized web crawlers, leading to a noticeable absence of Reddit content from Bing search results. Microsoft has been criticized for scraping Reddit data for AI training without compensation, leading Huffman to describe the situation as a significant inconvenience. In response, Microsoft confirmed it is adhering to Reddit's restrictions but emphasized that this impacts competition negatively. The ongoing conflict highlights broader concerns over data ownership and usage among tech giants in the AI space.