300 Publishers Join Forces to Ban AI Stealth Bots in Congress
Condé Nast, Hearst, and USA Today Co. are leading a charge against AI stealth bots, pushing Congress to pass the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act. This bill would require AI crawlers to identify themselves and their purpose before accessing and scraping websites.
September 30, 2026
Credit: © lucky-photographer / Getty Images via Canva.com
More than 300 news publishers are in Washington this week, lobbying Congress for legislation to ban AI “stealth bots.” The News/Media Alliance, a trade body representing news and magazine publishers, organized the effort.
The Bill's Scope:
The Stealth Bot Prohibition Act (H.R. 9915) defines a stealth bot as one that:
- Accesses a site without disclosing its identity and purpose.
- Fails to provide an accurate user-agent string.
- Doesn't state the intended use of the scraped content, such as search indexing, AI training, or retrieval augmented generation.
The bill prohibits using stealth bots in ways that harm or burden websites. It also bans disguising bots as human users for generative AI tasks.
Penalties and Enforcement:
The Federal Trade Commission could impose civil penalties of up to $53,000 per violation, adjusted annually for inflation. State attorneys general can also sue and seek damages for their residents. The rules would take effect 180 days after the bill becomes law.
Background:
Republican Representatives Laurel Lee and Gus Bilirakis of Florida and Democrat Valerie Foushee of North Carolina introduced the bill in July. It's currently with the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
"Today, website operators are often left in the dark about who is accessing their systems," said Lee at the time.
Several states, including Missouri, Nebraska, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah, have proposed similar legislation. New York passed its own Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act in June.
Publishers' Motivations:
Bots now account for over 60% of internet traffic, according to Cloudflare data (cited by Digiday). Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told The Verge that bots can generate traffic equal to 1,000 times human traffic.
TollBit recorded over 22 billion AI bot scrapes in the first half of 2026. On publisher sites it tracks, the ratio of AI bot visits to human visits rose from 1 in 314 in 2025 to 1 in 31 by Q4.
Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance, emphasized the personal connections between publishers and their representative lawmakers.
"They're all having the same experiences. Too many of these bots are coming on their sites. They can't handle the traffic because they're too small. If they can, the bots steal their content, undermining the marketplace," she said.
Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch has been a vocal supporter of the bill, stating, "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."