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?All they’re going to do is teach the AI that sometimes people end posts with useless disclaimers.
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.
That’s quite quiet quintessentially quiescent and clearly colloquially colour clever.
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
It’s like weapons testing. You only move to ban testing after you’ve developed it yourself.
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.
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.
The translation for this is do we stand to profit more than we stand to be punished.
Basic capitalist risk assessment in other words.
They can’t even be punished.
robots.txtis 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.
Yeah I know. But I wanted to point out that the comment in the article wasn’t so much a real consideration as business risk analysis 101. Along with a healthy dose of corporate spin.
Robots.txt isn’t even a rule, it’s a request.
“Please do not ask for the following content if you are a robot”.
If you don’t want someone to look at your content, you ultimately have to not give it to them, not just ask them to not ask.
They stand to profit if this is made into a real law.
Any regulation on AI just kill off their competition at this point. They are both lobbying for it and numerous proposed “anti-AI” laws have been their doing.
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?
So cynical … what makes you think “a startup aiming to broker paid licensing deals between publishers and AI companies” can’t be trusted implicitly?
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.
Exactly.
If you can’t train using public, copyrighted material, Disney has a hell of a model and their monopoly over the entertainment industry goes from huge to insurmountable. No “little guys” gain anything. It’s regulatory capture, nothing more.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
Yes, the less expensive VPNs especially have a lot of users using the same IP addresses.
You can get a VPN with private IP’s but this is more expensive. For a company of OpenAI’s size that would be a drop in the bucket though.
Google “spider trap website” or something.
Yes, they’re evil. Was there a question?
If you put it online, you gave it away. If someone reads it and then uses that information to answer questions for someone else without giving credit to the author, that’s called a conversation. As long as no copyrights are being abused, there is no problem and this is just corporations upset with what they think is piracy, pandering to people who are still on the fence about AI.
Except we shouldn’t be giving corporations same rights as individuals. Doing so leads to corporate feudalism.
So it’s okay for me to pirate something but not a corporation?
OpenAI has a clause that one cannot train their own AI on OpenAI chatbots
If it was all a giant open source project I’m sure many would be more accommodating to your argument.
So if it’s open source, it’s okay?
You got it backwards. According to OpenAI and Microsoft you have to respect their copyright but they can ignore yours.
Also no you can’t pirate but they can.
Any questions?
