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OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic back shared AI scrape opt-out
OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic will adopt a shared robots.txt token so publishers can set AI-training preferences across crawlers, The Verge reported, citing Search Engine Roundtable.
OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic say they will honor a shared robots.txt signal so publishers can opt out of AI scraping once instead of telling each crawler separately, The Verge reported Friday, citing Search Engine Roundtable1.
The proposed control is a policy token drafted at the Internet Engineering Task Force by Kevin Kelley, a technical lead for standards at Anthropic, according to The Verge1. It would live in robots.txt, the long-standing file sites use to tell crawlers what they may fetch1.
The companies say they will restrict their AI crawlers if they encounter the token1. Anthropic has already adopted it; Google and Microsoft plan to support it next year; OpenAI said it would implement the signal in the coming months, The Verge reported1.
Microsoft said it would offer finer controls so a site can opt out of AI training or of grounding, the practice of pointing a model at a verified source, while still appearing in Bing search results, according to The Verge1.
The announcement comes as publishers try other ways to limit unpaid AI crawling, including Really Simple Licensing and Cloudflare's default blocks of AI bots, The Verge noted1. Whether the token becomes a widely implemented IETF standard, and whether other crawlers honor it, is not established in that report1.
