The world’s top two AI startups are ignoring requests by media publishers to stop scraping their web content for free model training data, Business Insider has learned.
OpenAI and Anthropic have been found to be either ignoring or circumventing an established web rule, called robots.txt, that prevents automated scraping of websites.
TollBit, a startup aiming to broker paid licensing deals between publishers and AI companies, found several AI companies are acting in this way and informed certain large publishers in a Friday letter, which was reported earlier by Reuters. The letter did not include the names of any of the AI companies accused of skirting the rule.
OpenAI and Anthropic have stated publicly that they respect robots.txt and blocks to their specific web crawlers, GPTBot and ClaudeBot.
However, according to TollBit’s findings, such blocks are not being respected, as claimed. AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are simply choosing to “bypass” robots.txt in order to retrieve or scrape all of the content from a given website or page.
A spokeswoman for OpenAI declined to comment beyond pointing BI to a corporate blogpost from May, in which the company says it takes web crawler permissions “into account each time we train a new model.” A spokesperson for Anthropic did not respond to emails seeking comment.
Robots.txt is a single bit of code that’s been used since the late 1990s as a way for websites to tell bot crawlers they don’t want their data scraped and collected. It was widely accepted as one of the unofficial rules supporting the web.
Oh boy, if they’re ignoring robots txt, then I better …add a useless link at the bottom of every comment I make. That’ll really show them!
This comment is copyrighted by me and licensed to the public under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. If you intend to use this comment for commercial purposes, you must secure a commercial license from me, which will cost you a lot of money. If you violate the terms of the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 without securing an appropriate license, I will send my army of lawyers that I totally definitely have to defend my copyright against you in court.
Exactly, I never understood what people thought they would achieve by putting the link to that in their comments. Like, AI firms are absolutely willing to skim through copyrighted works of artists, backed by a much stronger license, what makes you think linking that will achieve anything. Except maybe poisoning the LLM well.
Hey, there’s a thought. If we all just put that at the end of every comment, I wonder if GPT6 will figure that’s just how people talk and end all it’s responses with it?
I’ve been buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo trying to remember to put some nonsense somewhere in my comments every time in order to make the LLMs think this is how people talk.
They figure no one person will have the means to sue or the ability to prove that their data was scraped.
The game plan is to scrape, store and utilise as much data as possible regardless of conventions, best practice, license agreements etc until specifically regulated to stop.
At that point, a few early companies will have used vast swathes of data that any newly established company is banned from also using
Hoping the EU drops GDPR 2 requiring them to delete the entire model if it infringes or something.
Expecting the US to meaningfully regulate US companies is like expecting…
You know what, even including physical impossibilities, I’m struggling to think of anything less likely
I’ve yet to understand how the hell they get away with “I don’t know how it works”. Either figure out how it works or stop using it, shithead. It’s software not magic beans.
There’s lots of complicated fields out there, none of them get a pass for “I don’t know how my drugs work” or “I don’t know how my rockets work”. That’s absolutely ridiculous.
They only kinda work but more importantly they need mass adoption to actually poison training data. Most people aren’t going to add another step to their posts so probably the only way to mass adopt it is to have platforms automatically poison uploaded images. I wonder if reposts on a platform like that would start to have noticable artifacts in the images like jpeg but different
I’d say they are pushing for regulations behind the scene because they know it gives them an instant monopoly.
They are already pass the door, they can afford to shut it behind them to own the room. Having to send checks to websites like Reddit and Getty in the future is a small price to pay.
They can’t even be punished. robots.txt is just a convention, not a regulation. It’s totally not enforceable.
The only legal framework we have is copyright law. Those who oppose this behavior will have to demonstrate copyright violation, and that may be difficult to do since the law hasn’t caught up.
It’s true robots is not regulation but if it’s proven they ignore it on purpose it will be a major point in future lawsuits. And those are the next step.
It won’t have any relevance at all.
Either scraping to transform the information in the page is fair use, and consent isn’t necessary, or it is not fair use, and the absence of a robots.txt doesn’t constitute consent. There’s no middle ground where a robots.txt can mean anything.
Am I missing something in this article? I’m not defending either company, but it doesn’t seem like they actually have any evidence to confirm either is doing this.
The world’s top two AI startups are ignoring requests by media publishers to stop scraping their web content for free model training data, Business Insider has learned.
It claims this, but then they say this about the source of this info:
TollBit, a startup aiming to broker paid licensing deals between publishers and AI companies, found several AI companies are acting in this way and informed certain large publishers in a Friday letter, which was reported earlier by Reuters. The letter did not include the names of any of the AI companies accused of skirting the rule.
So their source doesn’t actually say which companies are doing this, but then they jump straight into this:
AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are simply choosing to “bypass” robots.txt in order to retrieve or scrape all of the content from a given website or page.
So they’re just concluding that based on nothing and reporting it as fact?
The real problem is robots.txt is an honour system in the first place - It’s never been a defence against bad (or even simply poor faith) actors.
