Four Major AI Giants Join Forces to Set Anti-Crawling Standard: Website Owners Get a Unified Opt-Out Switch
On November 1, it was reported that OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic will jointly adopt a new standard that allows website owners to declare, in one place within their existing robots.txt, that they reject AI crawling, without having to negotiate with each company individually. The mechanism was submitted to the IETF by Anthropic's Kevin Kelley. Previously, robots.txt was only used to notify search engines; going forward, it can be used to uniformly manage AI crawlers, making it easier for content providers to refuse to have their content exploited.