OpenAI says it will honor a common signal written in robots.txt
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OpenAI announces that it will honor a common signal written in robots.txt — it is a voluntary cooperation in which a website operator writes down once their preference about their content being used for generative AI training, and that preference is passed on together to the several participating AI providers. Built on the work of the AI Preferences working group at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), it was announced on the same day as the other participants, and the company said it is aiming to apply it within the coming months
Why it matters
Until now an operator had to identify each crawler one by one and manage separate rules for each provider. What this post promises, though, is an additional signal that does not replace existing crawler controls, and no date for applying it has been set, so the current state is a declaration of intent to honor it. Read together with the separate collection of fair use briefs OpenAI put out the same day, the response around training data is moving along two tracks, the courts and technical standards
Source — Primary sources first; secondary reports are labelled “Press”
Officialopenai.comhttps://openai.com/index/helping-websites-express-ai-training-preferences/Added in Week 44, 2026 · See that week
On the map — ⑮ Regulation, Law line
- Previous stopOpenAI sets out its text watermarking approach for the EU AI Act
- This recordOpenAI says it will honor a common signal written in robots.txt
- Next stopAmicus filings over fair use pile up in OpenAI copyright case (1:25-md-03143)