One switch to say no to AI scraping
AI models learn from text taken from websites, often without asking. Now OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic say they will honour a shared signal in robots.txt. That is the small file where websites tell robots what they may read. With one 'policy token' signal, a publisher can set its AI training choice for all participating companies at once.
The copyright fight continues too. The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, asks courts for a middle ground. Training on copyrighted work should be protected, it says, but chatbots repeating that work to users should not.
There is also friction for users. A post on X, shared on Hacker News and Reddit, claims Anthropic is cracking down on video game rewrites, with possible account bans. The details are unclear.
A single opt-out is good news for small websites, which had to block each company one by one. But it only works if the companies keep their word, and nobody outside checks. Friday we saw the open web start to close; this is the industry offering a key, on its own terms.
