A signal is coming to websites that disables artificial intelligence

Major tech companies, including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic, announced a new standard to prevent AI from collecting data from publishers. This standard allows publishers to implement a single method to block multiple AI bots without individual settings. A 'policy token' will be added to the robots.txt file of websites, indicating which bots can collect data. The rise of AI has increased server traffic, notably impacting Wikipedia's costs. Various approaches exist to address bot-related issues, including Really Simple Licensing for charging bots and blocking data collection. Microsoft will respect the new standard, while Anthropic has already implemented it, and Google and Microsoft plan to support it next year.