Major AI labs adopt publisher opt-out standard for web scraping

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic endorsing a unified opt-out mechanism suggests scraping has become legally and reputationally costly enough to warrant coordination—a rare alignment when business interests and creator friction converge. A single standard (likely C2PA or similar) eliminates the fragmentation that made non-compliance easy to justify, raising the bar for smaller AI companies to claim ignorance or technical impossibility as they scale training data. This consolidates power as much as it addresses creator concerns: established players standardize the rules now, preempting heavier regulation and claiming the "responsible" tier of AI development.