// THE VERGE — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
The biggest names in AI are backing a new way to opt out of scraping
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The new control will allow publishers to apply their AI training preferences across multiple crawlers.
The new control will allow publishers to apply their AI training preferences across multiple crawlers.
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OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic say they will adopt a new standard that publishers can use to opt out of being scraped by AI, as reported earlier by Search Engine Roundtable. With this control, publishers can apply their AI training preferences across multiple AI companies, instead of setting them individually.
The shared “policy token” signal is proposed by Kevin Kelley, a technical lead for standards at Anthropic, as part of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It will live within a website’s robots.txt file, which has long signaled which web crawlers can and can’t scrape a site — whether for search indexing, archiving, or AI training. Currently, sites have to signal their AI training preferences separately to each AI company.
The announcement comes as publishers grapple with the continuing influx of AI crawlers scraping their sites and feeding their content into AI models. Some companies and organizations have attempted to combat unauthorized scraping, with the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard giving publishers the ability to charge crawlers that visit their sites, and Cloudflare blocking AI crawlers by default.