Reddit has announced it will block the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine from indexing most of its pages after discovering that AI companies were using the archive to scrape user data and bypass platform policies. The restriction will prevent the Wayback Machine from crawling post detail pages, comments, and user profiles, limiting its access primarily to Reddit's homepage. Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt stated that while the Internet Archive provides a valuable service to the open web, instances of policy violations by AI firms scraping data through the Wayback Machine prompted this action. This move aims to protect user privacy and curb unauthorized data scraping by AI companies leveraging archived Reddit content. The decision has drawn attention to the broader conflict between digital archiving services and emerging AI data practices.