zlacker

There is no legal agreement to follow robots.txt, but it appears to have came up a few times (from the first search result for "court cases involving robots.txt"):

https://www.robotstxt.org/faq/legal.html

If an "ai.txt" were to exist, I hope it's a signal for opt-in rather than opt-out. Whereas "robots.txt" being an explicit signal for opt-out might be useful because people who build public websites generally want their websites to be discovered, it seemed unlikely that training unknown AI would be a use case that content creators had in mind, considering that most existing content predates current AI systems.