Steve Huffman

Steve Huffman (born 1983) co-founded Reddit in 2005 with Alexis Ohanian, left, and returned as CEO in 2015 to steer the sprawling network of communities through years of controversy and, in 2024, a public listing. A programmer by training, he wrote much of Reddit’s early codebase and remains a hands-on technical CEO. (Reddit-the-platform is profiled separately at Reddit; this entry is about Huffman’s own posture toward AI.)

Turning conversation into “modern oil”

Huffman recognised early that Reddit’s two decades of natural human conversation are among the most valuable training corpora on the internet — “the most cited platform across all models,” as he puts it. He negotiated data-licensing deals, reportedly worth roughly $60M/year with Google and around $70M/year with OpenAI, and reframed access to Reddit’s content as a paid privilege rather than an open buffet. For companies unwilling to pay, he has been blunt: Reddit sues, pursuing legal action against firms like Anthropic and Perplexity for alleged unauthorised scraping.

His stance is pro-AI in a very particular register: enthusiastic about the technology and eager to fuel it, but insistent that the humans whose words trained the models — and the platform that hosted them — get paid. Critics counter that the users who actually wrote the posts see none of that licensing revenue, a tension Huffman’s “modern oil” framing tends to gloss over.