X‘s new developer agreement restricts AI companies from using its content to train their models, signaling a strategic positioning in the growing market for licensed AI training data. This move aligns with recent industry trends toward monetizing platform content through exclusive AI training partnerships, as demonstrated by Reddit‘s Google deal and subsequent lawsuit against Anthropic for unauthorized data scraping.
The big picture: X has updated its developer policy to explicitly prohibit using content from the platform to “fine-tune or train a foundation or frontier model,” creating potential opportunities for exclusive AI training deals.
Strategic implications: The policy change positions X to potentially monetize its data through exclusive partnerships similar to Reddit’s arrangement with Google.
- This comes shortly after Reddit sued Anthropic for allegedly accessing its site more than 100,000 times since July 2024 despite similar restrictions.
- The timing suggests major platforms are increasingly viewing their user-generated content as valuable training assets that should be licensed rather than freely scraped.
Ownership context: Elon Musk‘s AI company xAI acquired X for $33 billion in March, creating an interesting dynamic in how the platform approaches AI data access.
- While the developer agreement restricts third parties from training on X data, the platform’s privacy policy still permits “collaborators” to train AI models unless users specifically opt out.
- X continues to use its own user data to train Grok, its in-house AI model, highlighting the strategic advantage of controlling both a major content platform and an AI company.
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