Bluesky pledges not to train generative AI on user posts

On Friday, X and Bluesky took two completely different paths on how they treat your data.

On the exact same day that X rolled out its new terms of service—explicitly granting itself the right to train its machine learning and AI models on everything you post—Bluesky pushed back with a clear promise.

The emerging decentralized platform declared that it has no intention of feeding user content into generative AI models.

A timely promise to fleeing creators

The timing was anything but accidental.

Bluesky has been riding a massive wave of new signups following the U.S. presidential election, largely driven by users quitting X over Elon Musk's political alignment and the platform's increasingly right-wing shift.

On Thursday evening, Bluesky revealed it had picked up over 1 million new users in just 24 hours, pushing its total user count past 17.14 million.

Many of those newcomers are digital artists, writers, and community builders who were terrified of having their work scraped for AI training.

Bluesky acknowledged this directly, noting that plenty of creators are making a new home on the platform and that their concerns about data scraping have been heard loud and clear.

The company did clarify that it still uses AI behind the scenes for content moderation and its Discover algorithmic feed. However, it made sure to specify that none of those systems are generative AI models trained on user posts.

Why it matters

For digital creators and artists, Bluesky just gave them the best reason yet to pack their bags. If you make a living off creative work and hate the thought of an algorithm devouring your portfolio without permission, Bluesky offers an immediate, low-friction refuge.

For the broader social media landscape, this draws a sharp battle line. While X turns its user feed into proprietary training data for its frontier models, Bluesky is turning data respect into its primary marketing hook.

We think this positioning is brilliant in the short term, but it comes with real trade-offs.

By locking itself out of generative AI training on user posts, Bluesky is voluntarily giving up the data goldmine that competitors are banking on. Scale is also still a reality check: while Bluesky is sitting at 17.14 million users, Meta's Threads already boasts over 275 million monthly actives and added 15 million signups this month alone.

Still, in a social web dominated by corporate scraping, Bluesky is betting that treating creator data like private property will buy something far more valuable: genuine community trust.