Credit: \u00a9 lucky-photographer \/ Getty Images via Canva.com Executives from more than 300 news publishers are in Washington this week to lobby Congress for a bill that would ban AI \u201cstealth bots\u201d. The News\/Media Alliance, a trade body for news and magazine publishers, organised the trip, Digiday reported on Tuesday. Those making the trip include Cond\u00e9 Nast CEO Roger Lynch, Hearst Magazines president Debi Chirichella and USA Today Co CEO Mike Reed. They are meeting senators, other members of Congress and their staff, Digiday\u2019s Sara Guaglione wrote.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, the alliance and America\u2019s Newspapers are hosting a day of programming for publishers and lawmakers. What the bill does The Stealth Bot Prohibition Act (H.R. 9915) defines a stealth bot as one that accesses a site without first disclosing who it is and why. That includes failing to identify itself through an accurate user-agent string. It also covers failing to state what the content is for, such as search indexing, AI training or retrieval augmented generation.<\/p>\n
The bill bans using stealth bots in ways likely to damage or burden a website. It also bans disguising a bot as a human user for use with generative AI. The Federal Trade Commission could seek civil penalties of up to $53,000 per violation, adjusted each year for inflation. State attorneys general could also sue and seek damages for their residents.<\/p>\n
The rules would take effect 180 days after the bill becomes law. Republican Reps Laurel Lee and Gus Bilirakis of Florida and Democrat Valerie Foushee of North Carolina introduced the bill in July. It sits with the House Energy and Commerce Committee. \u201cToday, website operators are too often left in the dark about who is accessing their systems and whether automated tools are collecting their content under false pretenses,\u201d Lee said at the time. The News\/Media Alliance calls the bill an attempt to set one standard for the whole country.<\/p>\n
Missouri, Nebraska, Tennessee, Texas and Utah have proposed similar rules. New York passed its own Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act in June. The federal bill\u2019s text says it does not affect rights or remedies under other federal or state laws. Why publishers want it Bots now make up more than 60% of internet traffic, according to Cloudflare data cited by Digiday.<\/p>\n
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told The Verge that bots could reach 1,000 times human traffic. TollBit counted more than 22 billion AI bot scrapes across the sites it analysed in the first half of 2026. On the publisher sites it tracks, the ratio of AI bot visits to human visits rose more than sixfold during 2025. By the fourth quarter, it stood at one in 31.<\/p>\n
Danielle Coffey, the alliance\u2019s CEO, said many of the executives have deep ties to the communities lawmakers represent. \u201cThey\u2019re all having the same experiences. Too many of these bots are coming on their sites. They can\u2019t handle the traffic because they\u2019re too small. If they can even handle it, if they\u2019re larger, it\u2019s stealing their content.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s undermining the marketplace.\u201d Lynch backed the bill in July. \u201cAI companies are using disguised bots to scrape and steal original journalism with zero accountability. They use our work to train and operate their systems that then directly compete with us.\u201d On Wednesday, Lynch told Cond\u00e9 Nast staff he is leaving to become CEO of Mattel, Business Insider reported. A means to an end Coffey said she hopes the bill can be the \u201cfoundational cleanup\u201d the market needs. If stealth crawlers must identify themselves, publishers can block them, she said.<\/p>\n
Then they can sign licensing deals with AI companies. \u201cThe bill is a means to an end,\u201d Coffey told Digiday. David Buttle founded SPUR, a publisher AI coalition. He said the bill could raise the cost and legal risk of stealth scraping. \u201cCompanies are currently paying for content but they\u2019re paying intermediary scraping services to do this, rather than publishers.\u201d Reed told Digiday the bill is \u201ca meaningful step toward greater transparency\u201d on how publisher content is accessed and used. \u201cBy coming together and speaking with one voice, we have a stronger opportunity to build support for legislation that will help create a healthier information ecosystem,\u201d Chirichella said. This year\u2019s fly-in has roughly twice as many executives as last year\u2019s and an extra day of programming, Coffey said.<\/p>\n
Conversations from last year\u2019s meetings inspired the bill. Other platforms are acting on scraping too. Reddit said this week it will shut down RSS feeds on 13 November, citing AI scraping. In July, Cloudflare gave AI crawlers a September deadline to pay publishers or face a block.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Credit: \u00a9 lucky-photographer \/ Getty Images via Canva.com Executives from more than 300 news publishers are in Washington this week to lobby Congress for a bill that would ban AI \u201cstealth bots\u201d. The News\/Media Alliance,\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22938,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22937\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}