Reddit is introducing a new moderator: AI

It’s also planning big changes for developers and old Reddit.

Reddit is enlisting AI to help moderate new subreddits — and eventually the rest of site. The company is introducing automated moderation tools that rely on LLMs to help mods manage their communities, and it’s expanding who can use those tools today ahead of a full launch later this year.

The company calls the suite of tools “Rules Hub,” and the tools let mods decide what rules should be automatically enforced and what should happen when a rule is triggered. Rules Hub relies on LLMs to evaluate “whether a post or comment matches the intent of a rule,” which “allows Rules Hub to better handle nuance, natural language, and edge cases while preserving moderator control,” Reddit says in a blog post . Right now, many subreddits use tools from a feature called Automoderator (aka Automod) to take action on rules, but Automod’s tools “depend on exact keyword and pattern matching.”

Reddit says that Rules Hub has been in testing for “the past few months” with “new and experienced moderators from over 700 communities, including members of Reddit’s Mod Council Network.” That test of Rules Hub is now expanding to “all newly created communities” and will be “widely available” at some point later in 2026.

Rules Hub will be optional for new communities, spokesperson Rosa Kim tells The Verge . However, it does sound as if Reddit plans to retire Automod’s enforcement features down the line: In its post, Reddit says that “Looking ahead, we believe Rules Hub, together with newer systems like Post & Comment Guidance and Safety Filters, can eventually replace many of the enforcement workflows that communities rely on from Automod,” Reddit says in its post.

Automod has been “one of the most important mod tools,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says in a post . “But it’s also hard to learn, hard to maintain, and heavily dependent on brittle keyword matching, regex, and inherited configurations that only a few people on a mod team, if any, understand. We can do better.”

The updated mod tools are just one of a few big platform announcements Reddit is making on Wednesday. The company is also planning big changes that will affect developers: It’s going to require new third-party apps to use the developer platform instead of the API.

“We envision a future where all good, trusted automation on Reddit runs within an ecosystem that allows us to offer support and enforce our policies consistently,” Reddit says. “To achieve this, we will continue supporting limited public API access, but we will gradually restrict new requests and require third-party apps to transition to and operate on Reddit’s Developer Platform.”

”Reddit’s public API wasn’t designed for today’s scale, automated abuse, or commercial scraping,” Huffman says. “We want useful bots, community tools, and good-faith developers to have a clear, well-supported way to build on Reddit. We don’t want bad actors to scrape Reddit indiscriminately, resell its data, or use it without accountability.”

The shift follows Reddit’s major API changes in 2023 that it put in place to get AI companies to pony up for Reddit’s data but also caused widespread backlash in part because they forced many beloved Reddit apps to shut down. Currently, if a developer wants to make a Reddit mobile app, they have to get permission from Reddit to get public API exemptions, and that will continue to be the case, Kim says.

Reddit doesn’t have a “set timeline” yet for requiring the developer platform, but the company will give “give the community ample notice” and provide a clear timeline, Kim says. The upcoming change will affect “all API apps except the ones we explicitly grant exceptions to,” according to Kim.

“In order to protect our platform, business, and users, we will need to do something.”

Reddit is also saying today that it’s planning more changes to old Reddit as part of its ongoing efforts to fight unauthorized scraping of its content. Those efforts already include blocking Reddit results from search engines that don’t pay , suing Anthropic and Perplexity , and blocking the Internet Archive to stop AI companies from using it to scrape data, and in June, the company announced that people would have to be logged in if they wanted to use the old Reddit interface.

Reddit doesn’t specify what the changes to old Reddit will be, but Kim says the company is “exploring different options” and notes that “in the short term we will limit access to logged-in users and migrate critical bots and moderator workflows.”

”In order to protect our platform, business, and users, we will need to do something” with old Reddit, Huffman says. “Actually, a lot of somethings. We have options: We can limit access, migrate important uses, or rebuild it on a modern tech stack, and I think we’ll probably do all of the above.”

Huffman also acknowledges that users may be wary of big changes. “We know announcements about APIs and legacy products come with some baggage ,” he says. (That’s Huffman’s link, not mine.) “‘Trust us’ isn’t good enough. If we’re asking you to move to something new, it has to be at parity or better in practice, not just in theory.” He says that Reddit won’t “remove major capabilities before there is a credible replacement,” will work with mods, developers, and communities affected, and will “share milestones along the way before any of these changes land.”

Update, August 5th : Added context from Reddit’s CEO.