Publishers in US and UK seek laws to force AI bots to reveal themselves

US and UK publishers are pressing for legislation to require AI bots to identify themselves, aiming to address the surge in stealth scraping of online content. DataDome reported that scraping made up 70.9% of malicious bot traffic, with a 185.2% increase over 12 months. Publishers like People Inc. and the Financial Times described large-scale, persistent bot activity, with millions of requests blocked, and highlighted the challenge of distinguishing legitimate bots from unauthorised ones.

The News/Media Alliance has organised over 300 publishing executives to lobby for the US Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, while a coalition of British and American publishers is calling for similar measures in the UK. The push reflects frustration with technical defences that struggle to keep up with increasingly sophisticated bot tactics, including impersonation of legitimate crawlers like Googlebot and GPTBot. Analysis by Centinel found that 84% of requests claiming to be GPTBot and 99% claiming to be Perplexity-User were fake.

Publishers argue that regulation is needed to ensure transparency and control over how AI companies and third-party scrapers access and monetise their content. The move could influence future data use, licensing agreements, and regulatory expectations for other sectors facing similar risks from unauthorised data scraping.