Yes, LinkedIn banned AI agent startup Artisan, but now it’s back

Over the past few days, several posts have gone viral on LinkedIn and Twitter/X after one of the most talked about AI companies in San Francisco suddenly disappeared from LinkedIn: Artisan AI.

The company’s LinkedIn page, individual employee profiles, and posts from executives all display a “This post cannot be displayed” message.

The startup has been banned from the site, Artisan CEO Jasper Carmichael Jack confirmed to TechCrunch. However, after working with LinkedIn over the past two weeks – and addressing the social network’s concerns – Artisan has now been reinstated.

“Every startup inevitably has some kind of thing that’s going to hurt them [from things] “What they do early,” Carmichael Jack said.

Contrary to what was rumored in viral posts, LinkedIn did not ban the company because its AI agents were sending spam to users. Carmichael Jack said LinkedIn objected to the startup’s use of the LinkedIn name on its website and also alleged that the company was using data brokers who hijacked the site without permission. Data scraping is a violation of LinkedIn’s Terms of Service.

Artisan AI is a graduate of the Y Combinator startup accelerator program and has become one of the busiest startups in San Francisco with its “Stop Hiring Humans” billboards posted around the city. Artisan offers an AI agent called Ava that makes outbound sales by finding and contacting potential customers. LinkedIn is known to be valuable turf for outbound marketing salespeople – both human and, increasingly, artificial intelligence.

While a couple of LinkedIn users appeared to notice Artisan’s ban about a week ago, posts and tweets about it have already gone viral this week.

“The LinkedIn enforcement team reached out to us, and they basically completely restricted our accounts, so we disappeared from the platform while they were reviewing it, which wasn’t ideal. But it was kind of funny, because once we were restricted, all of a sudden our lead stream started going up every day. And I think that’s because, obviously, a lot of people were posting about it,” Jack Carmichael explained.

As a founder who loves a good guerrilla marketing plan, he joked, “I wish we did it on purpose.”

The truth is that he was shocked when he received an email from LinkedIn on the evening of Friday, December 19, just before the Christmas holiday. Carmichael Jack described the team handling the ban as helpful and responsive, even if they were also anonymous and could only be reached via email.

To please LinkedIn, Artisan has removed all references to LinkedIn from its website. It was using the name to compare some of its data features to those of LinkedIn. The CEO also took a crash course in verifying third-party vendors, ensuring that his data partners are operating in accordance with LinkedIn policies.

While Jack Carmichael is happy to be back on the Microsoft-owned social network, he downplayed how damaging the decommissioning could be, saying very little of the data Artisan uses comes from the site. It is also about to launch a new version of the agent that is more independent and can use more channels to contact potential clients.

“We can work around anything. We’ll be launching dial-in as a channel in a few months — outbound dialing,” he said, so if it’s not possible to unblock on LinkedIn, “it won’t be the end of the world.”

Interestingly, LinkedIn is not a direct competitor. It actually launched its first AI agent last year called Hiring Assistant, but it’s focused on recruiting. However, LinkedIn going nuclear towards Artisan could indicate that a sales agent may be in the works one day as well. LinkedIn did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

In any case, Artisan’s public ban can be seen as a warning to all proxy players searching for data sources: Big Tech is watching.