With all respect to Mozilla, "respects robots.txt" makes this effectively DoA. AI agents are a form of user agent like any other when initiated by a human, no matter the personal opinion of the content publisher (unlike the egregious automated /scraping/ done for model training).

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Findecanor an hour ago | parent | next [-]

There is still a difference between "fetch this page for me and summarise" and "go find pages for me, and cross-reference". And what makes you think that all AI agents using Tabstack would be directly controlled in real time with a 1:1 correspondence between human and agent, and not in some automated way?

I'm afraid that Tabstack would be powerful enough to bypass some existing countermeasures against scrapers, and once allowed in its lightweight mode be used to scrape data it is not supposed to be allowed to. I'd bet that someone will at least try.

Then there is the issue of which actions and agent is allowed to do on behalf of a user. Many sites have in their Terms of Service that all actions must be by done directly by a human, or that all submitted content be human-generated and not from a bot. I'd suppose that an AI agent could find and interpret the ToS, but that is error-prone and not the proper level to do it at. Some kind of formal declaration of what is allowed is necessary: robots.txt is such a formal declaration, but very coarsely grained.

There have been several disparate proposals for formats and protocols that are "robots.txt but for AI". I've seen that at least one of them allow different rules for AI agents and machine learning. But these are too disparate, not widely known ... and completely ignored by scrapers anyway, so why bother.

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MrTravisB 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is a valid perspective. Since this is an emerging space, we are still figuring out how to show up in a healthy way for the open web.

We recognize that the balance between content owners and the users or developers accessing that content is delicate. Because of that, our initial stance is to default to respecting websites as much as possible.

That said, to be clear on our implementation: we currently only respond to explicit blocks directed at the Tabstack user agent. You can read more about how this works here: https://docs.tabstack.ai/trust/controlling-access

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mossTechnician 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree with you in spirit, but I find it hard to explain that distinction. What's the difference between mass web scraping and an automated tool using this agent? The biggest differences I assume would be scope and intent... But because this API is open for general development, it's difficult to judge the intent and scope of how it could be used.

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jakelazaroff 3 hours ago | parent [-]

What's difficult to explain? If you're having an agent crawl a handful of pages to answer a targeted query, that's clearly not mass scraping. If you're pulling down entire websites and storing their contents, that's clearly not normal use. Sure, there's a gray area, but I bet almost everyone who doesn't work for an AI company would be able to agree whether any given activity was "mass scraping" or "normal use".

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1shooner 3 hours ago | parent [-]

What is worse: 10,000 agents running daily targeted queries on your site, or 1 query pulling 10,000 records to cache and post-process your content without unnecessarily burdening your service?

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jakelazaroff 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I apprehend that you want me to say the first one is worse, but it's impossible with so few details. Like: worse for whom? in what way? to what extent?

If (for instance) my content changes often and I always want people to see an up-to-date version, the second option is clearly worse for me!

	▲	1shooner 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, I've been turning it over in my mind since this question started to emerge and I think it's complicated, I don't have an answer myself. After all, the first option is really just the correlate to today's web traffic, it's just no longer your traffic. You created the value, but you do not get the user attention. My apprehension is not with AI agents per se, it is the current, and likely future implementation: AI vendors selling the search and re-publication of other parties' content. In this relationship, neither option is great: either these providers are hammering your site on behalf of their subscribers' individual queries, or they are scraping and caching it, and reselling potentially stale information about you.

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ugh123 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

100%

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observationist 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Exactly. robots.txt with regards to AI is not a standard and should be treated like the performative, politicized, ideologically incoherent virtue signalling that it is.

There are technical improvements to web standards that can and should be made that doesn't favor adtech and exploitative commercial interests over the functionality, freedom, and technically sound operation of the internet