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

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

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

The startup had been banned from the site, Artisan CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack confirmed to TechCrunch. However, after working with LinkedIn over the past two weeks — and addressing the social network’s concerns — Artisan is now being reinstated. 

“Every startup inevitably has some kind of thing that comes back to bite them [from things] that they do early on,” Carmichael-Jack said.

Contrary to what the rumors in the viral posts said, LinkedIn did not ban the company because its AI agents were spamming users. LinkedIn did, however, object to the startup using LinkedIn’s name on its website and also alleged that the company was using data brokers who had scraped the site without permission, Carmichael-Jack said. Data scraping is a violation of LinkedIn’s terms of service. 

Artisan AI is graduate of startup accelerator Y Combinator and became one of San Francisco’s buzziest startups via its “Stop hiring humans” billboards posted around town. Artisan offers an AI agent it calls Ava that does outbound sales by finding and contacting potential customers. LinkedIn is famously precious turf for outbound marketing salespeople – both human and, increasingly, AI.

While a couple of LinkedIn users seemed to notice Artisan’s ban about a week ago, the posts and tweets about it really picked up steam this week. 

Carmichael-Jack explained that LinkedIn’s “enforcement team reached out to us, and they basically restricted our accounts completely, so we disappeared from the platform whilst they were reviewing it, which was not ideal. But it was kind of funny, because once we were restricted, our lead flow suddenly started inching up every day. And I think it’s because, obviously, so many people were posting about it.” 

As a founder who likes a good guerrilla marketing scheme, he joked, “I wish we’d done it on purpose.” 

The truth was he was shocked to get an email from LinkedIn on Friday evening, December 19, right before the Christmas holiday. Carmichael-Jack described the team handling the ban as helpful and responsive, even if they were also anonymous and only reachable by email. 

To appease LinkedIn, Artisan removed all mentions of LinkedIn from its website. It was using the name to compare some of its data features to LinkedIn’s. The CEO also got a crash course in third-party vendor verification, ensuring that his data partners were operating in compliance with LinkedIn’s policies.

While Carmichael-Jack is happy to be back on the Microsoft-owned social network, he downplayed how damaging being booted off would have been, saying very little of the data Artisan uses comes from the site. He’s also about to release a new version of the agent that is more autonomous and can use more channels for contacting prospects.

“We can work around anything. We’re launching dialing as a channel in a few months – outbound calling,” so if the LinkedIn ban could not have been reversed, “it wouldn’t be the end of the world,” he said. 

Interestingly, LinkedIn isn’t a direct competitor. It did launch its first AI agent last year called Hiring Assistant, but it is focused on recruiting. Still, that LinkedIn went nuclear on Artisan could signal that a sales agent could one day be in its pipeline, too. LinkedIn did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. 

In any case, Artisan’s very public banning can be seen as a warning for all agentic players looking for sources of data: Big Tech is watching.