Picture this: you write something, publish it online, and within seconds an anonymous visitor has already copied every word. You don't know who it is. You don't know what they're doing with it. And you have no way to ask them to stop.
That's the situation 300 publishers say they're dealing with right now, and they're done being quiet about it.
Condé Nast, Hearst, and a few hundred other publishers sent a message to Congress on September 30, 2026. The message was simple: AI bots are scraping their content without identifying themselves, and it's time for rules.
I spend a lot of my life online. I write, I publish, I share photos and stories from wherever I happen to be that month. So when I read about this, my first question was obvious—how do you not know who's visiting your own website?
Turns out you can know, technically. But the bots causing trouble here aren't playing by the usual rules. They disguise themselves. They slip past the basic defenses publishers already have in place. Danielle Coffey, president of the News/Media Alliance, put it bluntly: "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."
That's a strong statement from someone who represents a lot of newsrooms.
The Bill They're Backing
The publishers are rallying behind something called the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act. It's bipartisan, it was introduced in the House back in July, and the idea behind it is pretty straightforward. If you're an AI bot scraping a website, you have to say who you are and why you're there. No more showing up in disguise.
Skip that step, and you could face civil penalties enforced by the Federal Trade Commission. The bill would also let state attorneys general step in and take action. So it's not just one agency watching—it's layered enforcement.
Executives from Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, and Vanity Fair reportedly made the trip to Washington to push for this. Debi Chirichella, president of Hearst Magazines, called it a step toward a "clean internet." Roger Lynch, CEO of Condé Nast, went further, accusing AI companies of taking original journalism without any accountability.
Here's where it gets interesting, though.
They're Also Cashing the Checks
Some of these same publishers that want Congress to crack down on sneaky bots have already signed deals to let AI companies use their content—for a fee.
Condé Nast has a multi-year deal with OpenAI. So does the Associated Press, The Atlantic, and TIME. The Guardian and Axios licensed content to OpenAI too. The Washington Post arranged to have its journalism show up inside ChatGPT. Google struck its first AI licensing deal with the Associated Press back in January 2025. Microsoft has agreements with AP, People Inc., and USA Today Co. Meta signed a multi-year deal covering seven publishers, including CNN and Fox News. Amazon has arrangements with The New York Times, Condé Nast, and Hearst.
So what's the real complaint here? It's not that AI is using their content. It's that they want to be the ones deciding when and how.
That distinction matters. There's a difference between a handshake deal where everybody knows what's happening, and a bot slipping in the back door at 3 a.m. One is a business relationship. The other is theft with better technology.
Not everyone's waiting on Congress. Ziff Davis, parent company of Mashable—the outlet that first reported on this lobbying push—filed its own lawsuit against OpenAI back in April 2025, alleging copyright infringement.
Why This Matters Beyond the Newsroom
I've built a business around sharing what I learn and experience traveling the world since 2017. If something scrapes my work without so much as a note saying hello, that affects me too—and it affects anyone who creates something online and wants a say in how it gets used.
The internet runs on content nobody else bothered to make first. Figuring out who gets paid, who gets asked, and who gets to say no is one of the bigger questions of this decade.
Will Congress actually pass this thing? Hard to say. But the fact that Condé Nast and Hearst are standing next to each other asking for the same rule tells you something. When rivals agree, it's usually because the problem's real.
Source: The Cryptonomist
See also our earlier piece: AI Can Now Make the Music. So Why Do We Still Want a Human Behind the Decks?
