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.
They are not random, that’s the point. They’re entirely deterministic and very precise, and they aren’t hiding anything; they will give you the most likely (not blacklisted) sequence of characters to follow your input according to their model. What they won’t give you is information, except by accident.
If they were random (hidden or not) they’d be harmless, no one would trust them any more than one of those eight ball toys, or your average horoscope.
The issue is that they’re very not random, so much that there’s no way to know if what they are saying bears any accidental semblance to the truth without fact checking… and that very soon they’ll have replaced any feasible way to fact check them, since all the supposed “facts” we’ll have access to will have been generated by LLMs train on LLM generated garbage.