By Luis Rijo
Publication Date: 2026-10-31 08:01:00
Google, Microsoft and OpenAI each said on October 30, 2026 that they will honor a single robots.txt instruction that lets a website refuse the use of its content for generative AI training across every participating provider at once, and the Anthropic engineer who wrote the specification told an Internet Engineering Task Force mailing list the same afternoon that his company had already started building support for it.
In Short
Four big AI companies have agreed to read the same short note on websites that says “do not use my pages to train AI.” Until now, a website had to write a separate note for each company’s robot, and each company used its own name for that note. The shared note is still a draft, and no company has said it reads it yet: Microsoft starts on February 1, 2027, Google plans to start in early 2027, and OpenAI and Anthropic have not given a date. Microsoft is also retiring its old opt-out method, and at Google the new note will also keep a site out of Gemini…
