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

Summary

Over the past few days, several posts on LinkedIn and Twitter/X 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 a 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. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 13-15, 2026 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...