Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic back one AI opt-out
A draft standard lets a website refuse AI training by all four companies with one robots.txt entry. Microsoft will honour it from February 1, 2027, and Google in early 2027. It does not stop crawling.
Microsoft, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic said on October 30 that they will support a shared signal for websites that do not want their pages used to train AI. The signal comes from a draft at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the body that writes many internet standards. A website adds one entry to its robots.txt file, instead of one for each AI company.