News organisations are increasingly tightening the gates on the Internet Archive after security teams and licensing departments flagged the risk that archival snapshots could be harvested to feed large language models. Industry observers say this shift forms part of a broader effort by publishers to exert greater control over how their reporting is collected and reused in AI training. According to reporting by Nieman Lab and analysis of wider industry behaviour, high-profile outlets have moved beyond informal monitoring to explicit blocks and exclusions. (Sources: [3],[4])

The Guardian has taken steps to prevent article pages from being accessed through the Wayback Machine’s URLs interface and has excluded itself from certain Archive APIs, measures its business affairs lead described as aimed at reducing the chance that commercial AI developers will extract its intellectual property. The publisher is continuing to allow homepages and topic landing pages to be archived while it works with the Internet Archive to implement the changes. (Sources: [3])

The New York Times has gone further, "hard blocking" the Archive’s crawlers and adding archive.org_bot to its robots.txt, saying it wants to ensure its journalism is accessed and used lawfully. Platforms beyond newsrooms have made similar moves: Reddit restricted the Wayback Machine’s ability to index most of its content in August 2025 after concluding that AI firms were using archived pages to bypass the site’s own licensing and platform rules. Multiple accounts of the Reddit decision appeared across technology outlets at the time. (Sources: [3],[2],[5])

The industry pattern is widespread. A study and reporting in Wired found that a large majority of major US news sites now block AI-oriented crawlers, while other datasets and audits of robots.txt files show many publishers disallow Common Crawl and specific Archive user agents alongside those from commercial AI companies. Publishers say these steps protect subscription revenue, advertising and licensing income, and help prevent unauthorised reuse of reporter-generated content. (Sources: [4],[3])

The Internet Archive’s founder and staff emphasise the public-service rationale for widespread archiving and note technical mitigations intended to limit abusive bulk downloads. The Archive’s leaders have warned that extensive exclusion of library collections would reduce public access to the historical record even as some publishers describe the Archive as a potential backdoor for data harvesters. The Archive has also said it uses rate-limiting and other controls and has asked large-scale researchers to coordinate with it before attempting heavy crawls. Past incidents, including a 2023 episode that produced a temporary outage after an AI project generated very large numbers of automated requests, are cited by Archive staff as lessons shaping current policy. (Sources: [3],[2])

The result is a fraught trade-off: newsrooms and platforms are adopting technical barriers to defend commercial and legal interests, while advocates for preservation warn that narrowing archival access will leave gaps in the public record. Training and collaborative archiving initiatives have been proposed to help local and resource-constrained outlets preserve material in ways that balance access with protection, but experts say such programmes are not yet widespread enough to substitute for the broad archival functions the Internet Archive has historically provided. The debate now centres on finding technical and contractual arrangements that allow responsible archival research and preservation without enabling mass, unauthorised scraping by AI operators. (Sources: [3],[4])

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Source: Noah Wire Services