ONE SWITCH TO OPT OUT: AI GIANTS BACK A SHARED 'DO NOT TRAIN' SIGNAL FOR PUBLISHERS

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic have announced plans to recognize a shared robots.txt signal asking that website content not be used to train generative AI models.

The proposed signal uses the robots.txt user-agent label __usage_ai-training with Disallow: /, set out in an individual Internet-Draft titled 'Machine-Readable Training Preference Signal,' published by Anthropic standards lead Kevin Kelley on October 30.

The signal is voluntary, does not cover every use of web content, and will take effect on different schedules: Anthropic says it has started implementing support, OpenAI says it aims to honor the signal for foundational generative AI training 'in the coming months,' Google aims to support it in early 2027, and Microsoft says it will honor it from February 1, 2027.

Meta has expressed support for a common signal but made no commitment to honor it.

The draft builds on work by the Internet Engineering Task Force's AI Preferences working group, but it is not an adopted internet standard — and the announcement comes as publishers face a surge in bots scraping their articles to feed AI models.