partial answer: the major labs (Anthropic, OpenAI) do respect robots.txt for their named crawlers, so blocking ClaudeBot/GPTBot in robots.txt works for those specific bots. What you can't easily opt out of is the indirect ingestion via Common Crawl, scraped datasets, and unnamed crawlers. agents.txt doesn't change that picture. The Allow-Training vs Allow-RAG split in the default is the useful part of the file. They're different operations with different costs to the site owner. Training is a one-time bulk ingest. RAG is a runtime fetch per query. A site owner might reasonably allow one and not the other.

▲ ninjin 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I can report that Facebook does not respect robots.txt. Heck, I even mailed domain@fb.com with the specific IP ranges and log samples three times over a month and they of did not even respond. Keeps on wasting my CPU cycles to this day by crawling massive development forks (I hope they choke on the data...):

    $ (cat /var/www/logs/access.log; zcat /var/www/logs/access.log*.gz) | grep 2a03:2880: | wc -l
    626396

About three hits per second for months now.

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dylan604 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Can you serve them a specific file that would make it expensive on their end?

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ninjin an hour ago | parent [-]

If I had the time and energy, I would make some sort of simple code language model and generate infinite junk and feed that to them in the hope that it ruins their future training runs. But, I lack the former and some of the latter. Alternatively, maybe I would actually read one of those "backdoor papers" and try to inject something like that.

	▲	dylan604 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I was wondering if this could be done without being malicious to that level. If they are costing you money, then I have no moral qualms playing in kind. Taking that next step would then give up the moral high ground and potentially introduce yourself to legally questionable grounds. I get the lack of time/energy for this type of thing. It is one of those projects that could be satisfying for yourself, but very hard to justify if you're a family person but something a younger person might get a lot of pleasure from.

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drcongo an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I block their entire ASN when they do that.