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OpenAI and Anthropic are ignoring an established rule that prevents bots scraping online content (archive.ph)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 109 points 4 months ago (17 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Whatever happened to those "nightshade" images that poison the model?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

You mean that work that took open source software, closed sourced it and refused to release the source code and the poisoning only worked against one specific open source model (stable diffusion)? I don't think that's going to come riding to anyone's rescue.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

They only kinda work but more importantly they need mass adoption to actually poison training data. Most people aren't going to add another step to their posts so probably the only way to mass adopt it is to have platforms automatically poison uploaded images. I wonder if reposts on a platform like that would start to have noticable artifacts in the images like jpeg but different

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