In the process, my reporting has found, common crawl has opened a back door for ai companies to train their models with paywalled articles from major news websites. Nonprofit organization common crawl provides major ai companies access to millions of paywalled news articles while claiming compliance with publisher removal requests, investigation reveals. The company quietly funneling paywalled articles to ai developers the atlantic / alex reisner / nov 5, 2025 “a search for nytimes.com in any crawl from 2013 through 2022 shows a ‘no captures’ result, when in fact there are articles from nytimes.com in most of these crawls. The common crawl foundation has been scraping the internet for over a decade, creating a vast archive used by ai companies to train models, including paywalled content Despite claims of compliance with publishers' requests to remove their articles, investigations reveal that many remain in the archive The foundation's director argues for the right of ai to access all internet content.
For more than a decade, the nonprofit common crawl has been scraping billions of webpages to build a massive archive of the internet, notes the atlantic, making it freely available for research In recent years, however, this archive has been put to a controversial purpose Ai companies including openai,… read article share share article
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