(Omer Taha Cetin/Getty Images)

Reddit’s stock briefly pumped yesterday after an old news article resurfaced — it’s deeply in the red today

An old Reuters article about a Reddit-Google partnership sent RDDT sharply higher yesterday.

3/18/25 12:33PM

With Reddit’s stock down ~50% since its early February peak, investors in Reddit haven’t had much to celebrate in the last month or so, as the AI momentum reversal has wrecked many of the highest-flying stocks of 2024.

But for a brief moment yesterday, traders sprung into action to bid up the stock, with Reddit breaking out of its market malaise and shares surging ~12% from 2:45 to 3:05 p.m. ET.

The apparent catalyst? A partnership with none other than Google, with numerous outlets running with a headline — Google expands Reddit partnership — that appears to have originated on Reuters, detailing how Reddit will be able to “use Google’s Vertex AI.” The only problem is that the news was more than a year old. A blog post from Google’s website dated February 22, 2024, confirms the details that many of the syndicated versions of the piece — such as this one, which remains on MSN — discussed.

Within about an hour the stock had soared ~12% higher before promptly giving up all the gains, and retail traders, writing on Reddit, weren’t happy:

RDDT Reuters pump and dump
byu/steamcube instocks

Reuters itself appears to have withdrawn the article entirely, with a piece in its place that reads:

“March 17 (Reuters) - A story on Google expanding its partnership with Reddit was based on outdated information and has been withdrawn.
There will be no substitute.”

So, why is Reddit getting hammered again this morning? There are a few possible reasons:

Reddit is strongly correlated with the “risk-on momentum trade” in Big Tech stocks. With the market down, led lower by names like Meta and Tesla, Reddit is coming under pressure.
Unfavorable analyst coverage: according to Barron’s, Redburn analysts launched coverage of the social networking site on Monday with a sell rating and a price target of $75.
Comments made by the company’s CEO last week, which implied that it was more valuable to use its data internally than license it to Google or OpenAI. Part of some investors’ bull theses on the stock was that it would continue to sign lucrative AI licensing deals.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

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Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

The race to influence AI chatbots is leading to some companies to adopt shady competitive tactics.

Tom Jones6/17/26

Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

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TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5