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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] 4 points 4 months ago

Uh, we don't really know how our drugs work (especially the older ones). We have a vague understanding of their mechanisms, but we really don't know how they work. We don't even have a clear idea of what the structures of most drugs look like, and how they interact with their binding sites.

Luckily, we don't actually have to know how they work, to know that they work. Instead we use clinical trials and real world evidence to support their use.

(Fun fact: there's actually a branch of drug development called phenotypic drug discovery which actually does away with the understanding of the mechanisms altogether. )