The federal Stealth Bot Prohibition Act was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives today as bipartisan legislation that would require stealth web crawlers powered
by artificial intelligence (AI) to disclose their identity and purpose when accessing websites.Representative Laurel Lee (FL-15) and Representative Valerie
Foushee (NC-4) introduced the bill, calling it the first step in establishing a secure and healthy marketplace and web.
“As artificial intelligence
becomes more sophisticated, we must ensure innovation is accompanied by transparency and accountability,” Lee stated. “Today, 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.”
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Agentic is completely rewriting media buying. Traditional manual bid
adjustments and siloed campaign setups are disappearing.
The industry is transitioning into an environment focused on automated strategy and business performance
metrics.
The legislation responds to growing concerns among publishers and online businesses that AI companies are scraping website content to train or operate their
systems. It aims to help businesses protect their networks and proprietary information while providing transparency about how AI systems interact with online content.
The
Federal Trade Commission will be authorized to
enforce the guidelines. The bill targets deceptive, AI-powered web crawlers and requires them to identify themselves and their purpose when accessing websites. It must still clear committee reviews
and pass full votes in the House and the Senate before reaching the President to become law.
"We are drowning in bot traffic that is hurting our ability to serve our readers, and existing
technical tools simply aren’t enough to protect our content from malicious actors that can disguise their identity. We need transparency and accountability for bad actors, as well as enforcement
mechanisms that require the most basic transparency disclosure," Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, wrote in an email to MediaPost.
She wrote that
the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act is a "sorely-needed, common-sense solution" to a problem that has plagued news publishers and other industries across the internet for years -- first with
traditional search and bots and then with AI-based agentic bots.
The News/Media Alliance estimated deceptive bots represent more than 50% of the traffic on some publisher sites. The
organization believes that forcing these bots to disclose their identity will allow publishers and verification tools to accurately filter them out from human audience metrics
The legislation would need to advance through the House and Senate before reaching the President’s desk.