Condé Nast Joins Leading Publishers in Call for Greater AI Transparency

Condé Nast has joined a coalition of British and American publishers, including The Times and the Financial Times, in a letter calling for legislation to prevent anonymous AI bots from scraping copyrighted content. Covered in The Times and shared below, the letter urges the UK government to require greater transparency from AI companies about who is accessing publishers' websites and how their content is being used, strengthening copyright protections and creators' ability to control and commercialize their work.

The Rt Hon Andy Burnham MP
Prime Minister
10 Downing Street
London
SW1A 2AA

CC: The Rt Hon Lisa Nandy MP, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport; The Rt Hon Jonathan Reynolds MP, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade

14 October 2026

Dear Prime Minister,

We represent businesses including the UK's leading national and regional news publishers, one of the ten most visited websites in the world, and a web infrastructure company that helps deliver and secure many of the world's biggest websites, handling more than five trillion web requests every day.

We urge you to back Damian Hinds MP's Automated Online Software (Access and Transparency) Bill or introduce equivalent provisions in this parliamentary session. This is a narrow, practical measure that would require bots to identify who operates them and why they are accessing UK websites. With bots now accounting for more than 50% of global web traffic, such measures are vital to protect the open web, British interests, and creators' ability to control and commercialise their content.

AI companies - and the third parties that scrape data for them - know that this activity threatens the information ecosystem on which the quality of their models depends. Internal documents unsealed this month in US litigation show one leading AI developer warning that its content strategy had started a "doom loop", damaging both its own models and the wider web. One of its senior scientists said the copying of news could be the "largest theft of labor in human history".

If the creators of trusted information receive no value for it, the supply of reliable information will diminish, then disappear. Without a continuing supply of high-quality, accurate information, AI models will degrade as they consume increasing volumes of their own AI-generated misinformation. This will cause serious harm to both the sources of trusted information and the AI models built on them.

The problem starts with bots that access UK websites without identifying themselves, their operators or their purpose. Website owners cannot see who is taking their work or how it will be used. Industry research this year found that 95% of the UK's leading websites could be accessed by commercially available bots, whatever defences their owners had in place. This makes it impossible to control access to information properly or to negotiate a fair price for it.Voluntary standards have failed. The only established means for a website to signal which bots may access it, the robots.txt protocol, carries no legal force and is being ignored on a mass scale.

The Hinds Bill is a modest fix. It requires bots to identify who operates them and what they will do with the content they access. It does not regulate AI firms directly or dictate a bot's behaviour. It simply gives website owners the information they need to identify and assess potentially abusive traffic, then take action to block it or negotiate fair payment terms for access.

This is not only a problem for publishers. Businesses of every size pay the hosting bills for crawlers they cannot identify, only to have valuable data, including personal data, extracted without their knowledge. The high volumes of bot traffic many experience slow their websites down or even take them offline completely. This is harming UK businesses at a time when they can ill afford further setbacks.

This is also a national security risk. Bot operators use residential IP proxies to route internet traffic through everyday consumer devices, making their activity appear as ordinary human traffic. The same technique and infrastructure are exploited by hostile state actors to launch concealed cyberattacks and mass cognitive warfare campaigns. This year, the UK joined the US, Japan and other allies in warning that state-sponsored Chinese hackers were using consumer devices to conduct their malicious activities. In practice, this means an operator in Beijing can appear to be a home user in Manchester, making hostile activity harder to identify and disrupt.

Much of the debate on AI fixates on distant, existential risks, but this harm is already here: unidentifiable bots are taking valuable content, imposing costs on businesses and weakening the market for trusted information. The continued creation of trusted information, including professional journalism, is critical to our epistemic security and our nation's democratic infrastructure. A National Centre for Information Defence will have limited impact if the public does not have easy access to reliable information from UK publishers.

The case for transparency is clear. What is missing is a decision to act. Therefore, to protect the UK's information security and the health of the open internet, we urge you to support the Hinds Bill or bring forward equivalent legislation in this session. Doing so will require AI firms to help sustain the creation of the trusted information on which their models depend - with the added bonus of supporting domestic growth and relieving pressure on business costs.

Yours sincerely,

Anna Bateson, CEO, Guardian Media Group

Chris Evans, Editor, The Daily Telegraph

Chris Longcroft, EVP, Publisher, The Times and The Sunday Times

Danny Groom, CEO, Daily Mail

Dan Conway, CEO, Publishers Association

Dominic Carter, EVP, Publisher, The Sun

Geoff Maynard, Editor in Chief, Daily and Sunday Express

Jen Wong, Chief Operating Officer, Reddit, Inc.

Jon Slade, CEO, Financial Times

Justine Roberts, Founder and Executive Chair, Mumsnet

Neil McIntosh, Editor, Daily Record

Sajeeda Merali, CEO, Professional Publishers Association (PPA)

Scott Lovett, President, Fastly

Steve Graves, Editor in Chief, Liverpool Echo

Theo Bamber, Chief Executive, News Media Association

Vasanth Williams, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Condé Nast