Training Data news

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.

Microsoft finishes pre-training its 2.8T MAI-Base-2 model

The model has 2.8 trillion parameters and is not released yet. Microsoft says it beats every open-weight model it tested and needs 4.2 to 12.3 times less computing power than DeepSeek’s best base model; no outside group has checked this.

Microsoft AI said on October 15 that it has finished pre-training MAI-Base-2, its largest model so far. It is a mixture-of-experts model with 2.8 trillion parameters, of which 80 billion work on each token. The model is now in a second stage of training, and Microsoft gives no release date.

Reddit will end RSS feeds and its public API over scraping

RSS stops on November 13 and public API access ends in March 2027. Reddit blames large-scale scraping and automated abuse, and apps that want to keep access must register.

Reddit told moderators and developers on September 30 that its RSS feeds will stop on November 13, and that public access to its API will end in March 2027. It called RSS “a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse”. Apps and bots must register on its Developer Platform to keep access, and Old Reddit will be limited to moderators and recent users.

Appeals court rejects fair use for Ross’s AI training

It is the first US appeals ruling on AI training and copyright. The court’s reasoning is sealed for now, and the case involves a search tool, not generative AI.

A US appeals court on September 29 upheld a ruling that Ross Intelligence infringed Thomson Reuters’ copyright by using material from Westlaw’s legal summaries to train an AI search tool. It is the first US appeals ruling on whether AI training can be fair use. The 32-page opinion is sealed while the two sides propose redactions.

Two newspapers are suing OpenAI and Microsoft

Both companies had supported the papers’ AI projects.

The Seattle Times and Newsday say OpenAI and Microsoft copied paid articles without permission. A court must now decide if the companies broke copyright law.

The US government supports OpenAI in a major copyright case

The Justice Department says training AI on copyrighted work can be fair use. This may influence the case, but the judge still makes the legal decision.