The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has long functioned as a digital memory bank, preserving snapshots of websites that can disappear, change or be quietly edited over time. For journalists, researchers and lawyers, it has been a crucial tool for checking what was published and when. Now that role is being complicated by a growing wave of restrictions from major publishers worried about how archived material may be reused in the age of artificial intelligence.

According to Wired, which was cited by several other outlets, 23 news organisations are now blocking the Internet Archive’s crawler from storing their pages. Among them are The New York Times and USA Today, while other reports say The Guardian is also among the publishers tightening access. The blocking does not appear to be about ordinary readers trying to bypass paywalls; rather, it reflects concern that archived pages could be harvested by AI firms to train large language models.

That fear has sharpened as publishers look for ways to stop their reporting from being used without permission. The New York Times has argued that its material on the Internet Archive is being used by AI companies in ways that may breach copyright and put it in direct competition with the newsroom. The Internet Archive’s own director of the Wayback Machine, Mark Graham, has warned that the broader lockdown of the public web is making it harder to understand how institutions, companies and governments have behaved over time.

The irony is hard to miss: some of the same organisations relying on the Wayback Machine for reporting are also limiting its ability to preserve their own history. USA Today, for example, has used archived material in recent investigations, yet has joined the blocking trend. Journalists have responded with a petition defending the Internet Archive’s role in preserving the public record, and discussions between the archive and publishers are still under way, leaving open the possibility of a compromise that protects both copyright claims and historical access.

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Source: Noah Wire Services