300 media execs push the bad bots bill in DC

More than 300 publishing executives, including Condé Nast's Roger Lynch, Hearst's Debi Chirichella and USA Today's Mike Reed, travelled to Washington DC to push the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, which would force AI crawlers to identify themselves and their purpose. Cloudflare data shows bots now make up over 60% of internet traffic, and TollBit detected more than 22 billion AI bot scrapes across the 987 billion site visits it analysed in the first half of 2026.

The crux

Publishers are trying to legislate transparency into AI scraping so they can block stealth crawlers and force licensing deals, and this fly-in was roughly twice the size of last year's.

Sell-side read

If stealth bots must self-identify, publishers regain the ability to control their own content and convert scraping into licensing revenue. This is the regulatory precondition for a functioning AI licensing market.

Watch

Whether the bill gains traction as Congress returns to session, and The New York Times copyright ruling as a complementary legal lever.