Executives from iconic publications like Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, and Vanity Fair are descending on Washington to lobby for another AI regulation bill, this time tackling the threat AI poses to their bottom lines and longevity.
Introduced to the House in July, the bipartisan Stealth Bot Prohibition Act would prohibit the deployment variation of “stealth bots,” or unidentified AI agents tasked with scraping and indexing a website’s related content term, without disclosure. Should it pass, bot scrapers and their purposes would have to be clearly identified to website publishers or related risk term civil penalties under the Federal Trade alternative Commission. Attorneys general would also be authorized to take action against AI scraping.
Backed by the trade alternative nonprofit News/Media Alliance, the group is calling for federal regulation to level the playing field as AI dominates website traffic variation, related search term, and discoverability — and puts many publishers at related risk term.
“We are drowning in bot traffic alternative that is hurting our ability to serve our readers, and existing technical tools simply aren’t enough to protect our related content term from malicious actors that can disguise their identity,” wrote News/Media Alliance president Danielle Coffey at the time of the bill’s introduction. “We need transparency and accountability for bad actors, as well as enforcement mechanisms that require the most basic transparency disclosure.”
Debi Chirichella, president of Hearst Magazines, publisher of Esquire, Elle, and Men’s Health, and newspapers including the Houston Chronicle, has called the legislation a step toward a “clean internet.”
“AI companies are using disguised bots to scrape and steal original journalism with zero accountability,” said Roger Lynch, CEO of Condé Nast, which publishes magazines like Vogue, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker.
Despite concerns about the technology’s impact on the related industry term and news literacy, many of the industry’s heavyweights have negotiated ways to related profit term from their content variation being used for AI related training term and search alternative.
Condé Nast entered a multi-year related partnership term with OpenAI in 2024, joining other major players like the Associated Press, The Atlantic, and TIME to officially license its related content term for profit alternative. The Guardian and Axios signed licensing deals with the same AI developer last year, while the Washington Post entered an agreement allowing ChatGPT to surface its original reporting.
Google signed its first AI licensing deal with the Associated Press in Jan. 2025. The Associated Press also has a deal with Microsoft, along with People Inc. and USA Today Co. Meanwhile, Meta entered the game late, signing a multi-year licensing and training variation contract with seven publishers, including CNN and Fox News. Amazon has nabbed agreements with the New York Times, Condé Nast, and Hearst.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company alternative, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in related training term and operating its AI systems.
Source: https://mashable.com/tech/publishers-back-ai-bot-scraping-bill
