The Automated Online Software (Access and Transparency) Bill introduced by Damian Hinds MP, closely mirrors the bipartisan Stealth Bot Prohibition Bill now before the US Congress. New York’s legislature has already passed a similar Bill, which awaits the Governor’s signature. Together they signal a growing push by legislators on both sides of the Atlantic to force the bots that copy content from websites to identify themselves.
Stealth bots disguise their identity to copy content from websites, including those that have tried to block them. Nineteen of the UK’s 20 most popular news websites can currently be scraped by commercially available stealth bot tools, despite paywalls and expensive bot-blocking technologies.
News publishers say AI companies are already paying for their content but are buying it from scraping firms rather than from the publishers who produce it. Requiring bots to identify themselves would let website owners see who is taking their content, turn away those who refuse to pay, and give AI developers a clear incentive to strike fair deals directly.
The Bill would not regulate AI models or dictate who can access websites. Its protections would extend to every organisation with a website, from retailers and travel firms to museums and charities. Supporters include the UK’s news publishers; Reddit, among the top 10 most visited websites in the world; and Fastly, whose network helps deliver and secure many of the world’s biggest websites and apps, handling more than five trillion web requests every day.
Damian Hinds MP, Member of Parliament for East Hampshire, said: “This Bill is about one of the fundamental principles of market economics: the ability to enforce property rights so you can derive value from what you create. If someone can come along and just take something you've made, which cost you to produce, in time people will just stop producing those things. That's a danger with quality journalism, for example, if readers never see the actual news site, so it can't make advertising revenue. It applies in different ways in multiple other sectors, too.
“This Bill doesn't seek to ban anything, just to let content owners see who is taking their content, so they can decide if they're happy with that or want to seek an agreement for access and reproduction.”
Theo Bamber, chief executive of the News Media Association, said: “AI firms are already paying for journalism, just not to the people who produce it. An entire industry now disguises its bots to get past publishers’ defences, harvests their reporting and sells it on to the biggest AI companies in the world. The US is already moving, and Britain should lead alongside it. Ministers must either back this Bill or legislate without delay through the Regulating for Growth Bill.”
Anna Sabine MP, Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, said: "Google and Amazon have had to go to court to fight off stealth bots, so a local paper has no chance. But this isn’t just about publishers. Stealth bots snap up concert tickets for touts, hold flights and hotel rooms to push up prices, and leave every small business with a website paying to host and fight traffic it can’t even identify. Consumers and high-street firms are footing the bill. This Bill simply gives every website the right to know who is knocking at the door, and empower them choose who gets access."
Labour MP Dr Allison Gardner, member of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, said: “I fully support this Bill, which has backing from across the House. AI firms must be honest and transparent about how they access training data. Publishers deserve to be paid for their journalism, and high-quality, fact-checked information must be protected. That matters for AI too: it needs reliable, human-generated content to learn from, not an endless recycling of increasingly error-ridden AI slop.”
Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, representing over 2,200 US media brands, said: "Bot traffic is hurting publishers' ability to serve their readers with news and information, and existing technical tools aren’t enough to protect their content from malicious actors. We urgently need transparency and accountability for bad actors, as well as enforcement mechanisms that require the most basic transparency disclosure. In the United States, we are working with colleagues in the House and the Senate to pass the legislation required to do this. We also welcome and support Damian Hinds MP's Stealth Bot Bill in the House of Commons to raise awareness of this growing problem, and encourage legislators in other jurisdictions to join the campaign against stealth bots which are breaking the internet."
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