Washington, DC – Today, Representative Laurel Lee (FL-15), Representative Valerie Foushee (NC-4), and Representative Gus Bilirakis (FL-9) introduced the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act (H.R.9915), a bipartisan piece of transparency legislation that would require AI stealth crawlers (“bad bots”) to disclose their identity and purpose, the first step in establishing a secure and healthy marketplace and web.
Danielle Coffey, President and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, said, “The Stealth Bot Prohibition Act is a sorely-needed, common-sense solution to a problem plaguing news publishers and other industries across the internet. 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. The News/Media Alliance thanks Rep. Lee, Rep. Foushee, and Rep. Bilirakis for their commitment to keeping the internet clean, and look forward to working with them and their colleagues in both the House and the Senate to pass this critical piece of legislation.”
Industry leaders lent their voices in support of the bill today, including:
Robert Thomson, Chief Executive, News Corp, said, “Stealth bots are the silent scavengers of the internet—phantom parasites that loot legitimate sites and pillage intellectual property. By unmasking these bad boy bots, this legislation performs a vital role in protecting creators and journalists, and safeguarding internet integrity. The rampant proliferation of these malevolent bots has degraded the digital ecosystem and we are proud to partner with other publishers in ensuring that AI does not stand for Abomination Incorporated.”
Debi Chirichella, President of Hearst Magazines, said, “This legislation is an important step toward creating a clean internet and a healthy marketplace. Innovation must flourish alongside responsible business practices.”
Roger Lynch, CEO of Condé Nast, said, “AI 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. The bipartisan Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, requiring bots to identify themselves and their purpose, is a practical step toward helping publishers preserve the integrity of our journalism and trust with audiences. We commend Representatives Lee and Foushee for their leadership in introducing this important legislation.”
Conan Gallaty, CEO of Tampa Bay Times, said “This bill gives needed protection to American companies like ours against bad actors. Malicious scraping by stealth bots hurts all content creators and, ultimately, consumers.”
The Stealth Bot Prohibition Act offers a simple solution to a growing problem that threatens the health of the internet and our information ecosystem – an explosion of bad bots. Researchers now say that there are more bots than people on the internet, and a majority of those bots act in harmful ways to content providers, hiding their identities, overloading servers, and stealing content to be offered on a reseller market.
This flood of bots, many of whom come from foreign countries like China or Russia, creates national security and competitiveness vulnerabilities and imposes substantial burdens on content providers of all types who are often overwhelmed by millions of bot hits each day, degrading performance for human readers.
The Stealth Bot Prohibition Act would empower news publishers and other content providers to defend themselves by mandating transparency for all bots crawling their sites. Currently, bots are free to mask their identities, with many going so far as to hijack personal devices or servers in American homes to act as “residential proxies,” disguising their activity to look like humans. This bill would put a stop to this deception by requiring all bots to identify themselves and their purpose, giving news publishers and other content providers the information they need to protect their work. In doing so, it takes the first step towards establishing a functional marketplace for news content.
This is the leading attempt to nationalize a collection of state-level transparency legislation and provide one common-sense standard for the entire United States. Over the last year AI transparency legislation has been proposed in states like Missouri, Nebraska, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah, and the New York State Legislature recently passed the “New York Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act,” which functions similarly to the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act.
For more information, visit the News/Media Alliance Stealth Bot Prohibition Act Resource Center.
