Stealth Bot Prohibition Act (H.R. 9915)
Bipartisan House bill would make AI scraping bots identify themselves; 300+ publishers lobby for it
Confirmed
The takeaway
On July 23, 2026 Reps. Laurel Lee (R-FL), Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) and Valerie Foushee (D-NC) introduced the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act (H.R.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 12 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra84 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.523 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 3.8 Flash114 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.753 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 23 days before it.
Key facts
- H.R. 9915 (119th Congress), introduced July 23, 2026 and referred to the House Energy and Commerce Committee; sponsors Laurel Lee (R-FL), Gus Bilirakis (R-FL), Valerie Foushee (D-NC)
- Defines a ‘stealth bot’ as one that accesses a site without disclosing its identity and purpose, e.g. no accurate user-agent string or no stated purpose such as search indexing, AI training or retrieval-augmented generation (The Next Web)
- Bans stealth bots likely to damage or burden a website, and bans disguising a bot as a human user for use with generative AI; takes effect 180 days after enactment
- Enforcement: FTC civil penalties up to $53,000 per violation, inflation-adjusted; state attorneys general may sue for damages on behalf of residents
- Lee: ‘website operators are too often left in the dark about who is accessing their systems’
- Lobbying: the News/Media Alliance brought executives from more than 300 news publishers to Washington (Sept 29–30, 2026), about twice last year’s number, including Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch, Hearst Magazines president Debi Chirichella and USA Today Co. CEO Mike Reed (Digiday, The Next Web)
- News/Media Alliance CEO Danielle Coffey: ‘We are drowning in bot traffic that is hurting our ability to serve our readers’; the Alliance says deceptive bots are more than 50% of traffic on some publisher sites (MediaPost)
- Scale: TollBit counted more than 22 billion AI bot scrapes on the sites it tracks in H1 2026; by Q4 2025 there was 1 AI bot visit per 31 human visits on those sites (The Next Web)
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- States: New York’s legislature passed a Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act in June 2026; similar proposals in Missouri, Nebraska, Tennessee, Texas and Utah (The Next Web)
- Status (Oct 12, 2026): no committee action reported; no Senate companion found
What happened
AI companies’ crawlers, and the retrieval bots that fetch pages when a chatbot answers a question, now make up a large share of traffic to news sites, and some hide what they are. The bill does not ban scraping. It requires a bot to say who it is and what it is for, so that a site can block it or charge it, and it makes posing as a human visitor for generative-AI use unlawful.
Publishers made it the main request of their annual Washington fly-in at the end of September 2026.
Why it matters
It is the publishers’ preferred federal route for AI scraping: a disclosure rule enforced by the FTC, in place of waiting for copyright suits to settle whether training is fair use. Its chances in this Congress are unclear (no hearing or markup yet).
Note: we did not read the bill text on congress.gov; the bill number and provisions are from The Next Web, the introduction date from MediaPost. The Digiday and Mashable articles were not read in full.
Sources
5 sources from 5 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
5 sources: 5 press
Press
- The Next Web: 300 publishers take their fight against AI stealth bots to Congressthenextweb.com, press
- MediaPost: Bipartisan bill targets AI stealth botsmediapost.com, press
- Digiday: Condé Nast, Hearst among 300 media execs to push federal ‘bad bots’ bill on AI scrapingdigiday.com, press
- Mashable: Publishers back AI bot scraping billmashable.com, press
- The Desk: Publishers push for new law banning bot-based AI scraping (Sept 30)thedesk.net, press
Changes
- Filed