Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, has told investors to keep their eyes on traffic logs and corporate contracts rather than headline extinction scenarios.
The industry has done a "pretty tone deaf job" of explaining AI risk, he argued, saying the real dangers are more mundane.
Among them he named the coordination of agent swarms, groups of AI programs acting together, that could reshape how traffic flows between websites.
He made the point in a CNBC interview, TheStreet reported.
Reddit as the test case
Ohanian held up his own company as the clearest example.
Reddit sits on both sides of the AI trade: it sells access to its archive for training, and it leans on search referrals to bring in the readers who generate ad revenue.
Google pays roughly $60 million a year for that access and OpenAI about $70 million, and both deals are up for renewal.
That pairing turns an abstract question about AI into a concrete one about the next contract.
The numbers behind the nerves
Reddit's latest results were strong.
Second-quarter revenue reached $805 million and net income $253 million, both ahead of forecasts.
Management still warned of volatile search referrals, a caution that helped push the shares lower.
The stock traded near $158 on 16 September, below its 2025 high, with investors fixed on the renewals and the referral risk.
A cooler way to price the threat
Ohanian's prescription is a practical one.
Watch the renewal terms and the traffic metrics, he says, and AI stops looking like an unpriced threat to civilisation.
It becomes instead a series of one-quarter, contract-driven risks that a company, and its shareholders, can actually measure.
