OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic back a shared standard for opting out of AI scraping
From the AI digest for Oct 31, 2026
What happened: OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic say they will adopt a new standard that lets publishers opt out of being scraped for AI with a single signal applied across all of the companies, instead of setting preferences with each one separately, The Verge reports, citing earlier reporting by Search Engine Roundtable. The shared "policy token" signal is proposed by Kevin Kelley, a technical lead for standards at Anthropic, as part of the Internet Engineering Task Force process.
What's genuinely new: A joint commitment from four of the largest AI companies to a single cross-company opt-out mechanism — up to now publishers have had to configure their training preferences lab by lab. The commitment is announced, not implemented; what the token will carry technically and how it will be enforced remain to be specified.
Watch: The IETF proposal's progress, whether publishers actually adopt the token at scale, whether the four companies' adoption lands in product, and whether holdout labs or scrapers undermine it.
Links: The Verge · Oct 30, 4:26 PM ET