Over the past few days, several posts on LinkedIn and Twitter/X have gone viral 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 displayed a “This post cannot be displayed” message.
The startup had been banned from the site, Artisan CEO Jaspar Carmichael-Jack confirmed to TechCrunch. But 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] they do that early,” 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. However, LinkedIn objected to the startup using LinkedIn’s name on its website and also alleged that the company used data brokers who had scraped the site without permission, Carmichael-Jack said. Data scraping is a violation of LinkedIn’s Terms of Service.
A graduate of startup accelerator Y Combinator, Artisan AI became one of San Francisco’s busiest startups via their “Stop Hiring Humans” billboards posted around the city. Artisan offers an artificial intelligence agent it calls Ava that performs outbound sales by finding and contacting potential customers. LinkedIn is famously precious fodder for outbound marketers – both human and increasingly AI.
While a few LinkedIn users seemed to notice Artisan’s ban about a week ago, the posts and tweets about it really took off this week.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
13.-15. October 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 while they were reviewing it, which wasn’t ideal. But it was kind of funny because once we got restricted, our lead flow suddenly started going up every day. And I think that’s because obviously there were so many people.”
As a founder who likes a good guerilla marketing scheme, he quipped, “I wish we had done it on purpose.”
The truth was, he was shocked to get an email from LinkedIn on Friday night, December 19, just before the Christmas break. Carmichael-Jack described the team handling the ban as helpful and responsive, although they were also anonymous and can only be reached by email.
To appease LinkedIn, Artisan removed all mention of LinkedIn from its website. It used the name to compare some of its data features to LinkedIn’s. The CEO also received a crash course in third-party vendor verification, ensuring that his data partners were operating in accordance with LinkedIn’s policies.
While Carmichael-Jack is happy to be back on the Microsoft-owned social network, he downplayed how damaging it would have been to boot, saying that very little of the data Artisan uses comes from the site. He is also releasing a new version of the agent that is more autonomous and can use multiple channels to contact prospects.
“We can work around anything. We’re launching calls as a channel in a few months — outbound calls,” so if the LinkedIn ban couldn’t have been reversed, “it wouldn’t be the end of the world,” he said.
Interestingly, LinkedIn is not a direct competitor. It launched its first AI agent last year called Hiring Assistant, but it’s focused on recruiting. Still, LinkedIn going nuclear on Artisan could signal that a sales agent could one day be in its pipeline as well. LinkedIn did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
In any case, Artisan’s very public ban can be seen as a warning to all agents looking for data sources: Big Tech is watching.