Artisan AI, the San Francisco startup behind those “Stop hiring humans” billboards, just survived a full‑blown LinkedIn ban.
For a few days, the company basically vanished from the Microsoft‑owned network. Its company page, employee profiles, and executive posts all showed the same dead-end message: “This post cannot be displayed.”
Artisan CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack confirmed the startup had been banned. After roughly two weeks of back‑and‑forth with LinkedIn’s enforcement team, the company 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.
Not a spam crackdown
Despite viral posts on LinkedIn and X speculating otherwise, this wasn’t about Artisan’s AI agents spamming users.
According to Carmichael-Jack, LinkedIn objected to two things:
- Artisan was using LinkedIn’s name on its website to compare some of its data features to LinkedIn’s.
- LinkedIn alleged that Artisan’s data brokers had scraped LinkedIn without permission.
LinkedIn’s terms of service explicitly ban data scraping. That alone is enough to trigger a harsh response.
The issue escalated when LinkedIn’s enforcement team reached out and “restricted our accounts completely, so we disappeared from the platform whilst they were reviewing it,” Carmichael-Jack said. The email landed on Friday evening, December 19, right before the Christmas holiday.
The team handling the ban stayed anonymous and only communicated over email, but Carmichael-Jack described them as helpful and responsive.
Ban goes viral — and boosts leads
A couple of LinkedIn users spotted Artisan’s disappearance about a week ago, but the story really blew up this week as posts and tweets about the ban went viral.
That online outrage had an unexpected effect on Artisan’s bottom line.
“Once we were restricted, our lead flow suddenly started inching up every day,” Carmichael-Jack said. His theory: the drama turned into free marketing because “so many people were posting about it.”
As a founder who clearly enjoys guerrilla tactics — remember the “Stop hiring humans” billboards — he joked: “I wish we’d done it on purpose.”
What Artisan changed to get back on
To get reinstated, Artisan had to clean up its LinkedIn footprint and fix its data pipeline.
First, it removed all mentions of LinkedIn from its website. Those references had been used to position some of Artisan’s data features against LinkedIn’s.
Second, Carmichael-Jack did what he called a crash course in third‑party vendor verification. The company dug into its data partners to ensure they were operating in compliance with LinkedIn’s policies and not feeding in scraped LinkedIn data.
Artisan’s core product is an AI sales agent called Ava. It finds and contacts potential customers, handling outbound sales — exactly the kind of activity that makes LinkedIn extremely sensitive about how its data and brand are used.
LinkedIn is “famously precious turf” for human sales reps, and increasingly, for AI agents trying to automate prospecting.
LinkedIn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
How much does LinkedIn really matter to Artisan?
Carmichael-Jack downplayed how damaging the ban could have been.
He said very little of Artisan’s data actually comes from LinkedIn. And the company is already moving to diversify its channels and make Ava more autonomous.
“We can work around anything. We’re launching dialing as a channel in a few months — outbound calling,” he said. If the LinkedIn ban had stuck, “it wouldn’t be the end of the world.”
A more independent agent that can hop across channels — email, phone, and whatever comes next — is strategically useful if one big platform suddenly slams the door.
A warning shot for AI agents
Interestingly, LinkedIn isn’t a direct competitor to Artisan. Last year it launched its first AI agent, called Hiring Assistant, but that tool focuses on recruiting, not outbound sales.
Still, the fact that LinkedIn “went nuclear” on Artisan over branding and alleged scraped data will raise eyebrows across the agentic AI ecosystem.
It suggests at least two things:
- Big Tech platforms will aggressively defend their brands and data, even against relatively small startups.
- If an AI sales agent is not yet in LinkedIn’s product pipeline, the company clearly sees enough strategic risk to act preemptively.
For other AI companies building agentic products on top of third‑party data, Artisan’s very public ban — and now quiet reinstatement — looks like a clear signal:
Big Tech is watching your vendors, your marketing copy, and your data sources. And it’s willing to pull the plug first, ask questions later.
