The largest artificial intelligence developers - OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic - announced on Friday a joint step toward media companies and other website owners. They proposed a single mechanism that will allow a site to prohibit, with one action, the automatic collection of content for training AI models.
Currently, publishers have to write separate prohibitions for each bot that crawls pages and collects data. The new scheme envisages one standard instruction that any AI company joining the protocol will understand and follow.
However, the promise will not take effect in a single day. Microsoft will implement the setting from February 1, 2027, and Google during 2027. The creator of ChatGPT, OpenAI, speaks of the coming months, while Anthropic, the developer of Claude, says it has already begun implementation.
The background is this: publishers have faced a sharp rise in the number of bots that download their articles to replenish AI training data. Some, such as The New York Times, have gone to court. In December 2023, the newspaper filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of using millions of its materials without permission and payment to train ChatGPT. The companies cite an exception in copyright law - so-called fair use.
In parallel, internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare has, since July 2025, blocked AI bots by default on new customers' sites. And a standard called Really Simple Licensing already allows publishers to charge bots that visit their pages.
The new setting, according to Microsoft, will apply only to future model training, but does not prohibit bots from visiting sites for other purposes. Until a publisher changes the parameter itself, content collection will remain permitted by default.
In separate statements, Microsoft and Google warn: opting out of AI training may reduce the chances that a publication's material appears in AI applications and services. Meta representative Andy Stone on social network X supported the initiative, calling a common signal about preferences an important step.