US publishers are pressing Congress to pass legislation targeting bots that hide their identity while collecting website content for AI.
More than 300 publishing executives were expected to take part in a Washington lobbying trip on September 29, Digiday reported. Participants included leaders from Condé Nast, Hearst, USA Today Co. and The Seattle Times.
The bill would make crawlers disclose their intended use
The Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, H.R. 9915, was introduced on July 23. Its definition of a stealth bot covers failure to disclose identity and purpose, including proposed uses such as search indexing, AI training and retrieval augmented generation.
The proposed prohibitions cover deploying stealth bots in ways reasonably likely to damage, impair or burden a service’s technical or commercial operation, and intentionally disguising bots as human users for generative AI purposes.
The text would allow the FTC to seek penalties of up to $53,000 per violation, subject to inflation adjustments, and provides for state enforcement. It remains a proposal.
A crawler’s purpose affects what a publisher can permit
Identification becomes more useful when it includes the intended use of the material. A publisher may welcome search referrals while refusing model training. An accurate bot name alone gives little control if the operator does not explain which activity the request supports.
SEW’s recent examination of Cloudflare’s crawler controls explains how search and training permissions differ across providers. Those controls also rely on identifying the request and, for robots.txt, the crawler cooperating.
Digiday reports that publishers see disclosure as a step toward blocking unwanted access and negotiating licenses. The bill itself establishes neither a standard licensing price nor an automatic payment obligation for scraping.
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