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.
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.
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?
Novice web site owner/coder here: wondering if I can block them somehow via IP address in addition to robots.txt. Server firewall rule? Remember, I said I was a novice…
You can block an IP but first you would need to know which IPs are scrapers. And they could just use a VPN to bypass IP blocks.
TollBit, a startup aiming to broker paid licensing deals between publishers and AI companies.
If we can’t scrape data freely, it instantly kills the open source scene. These regulation only benefit companies like OpenAi and Google, who will happily pay an exorbitant price to have exclusive rights on data they don’t already own and get a monopoly in return, as well as the companies who own this data like Reddit, Getty, Adobe, etc.
Getting a dime was never in the cards for individuals except maybe the outliers like GRR who can throw their weight around.
Almost all regulation being proposed only benefit big AI companies and are meant to kill any competition. They are flooding the media with bad sentiment articles to manipulate people so they can tell congress their constituents want this.
So, the same thing media websites do when they ignore my “do not track” request?
