A11292

A11292 is a New York State Assembly bill passed on 5 June 2026 requiring AI web crawlers to disclose their identity to websites they access. Operators of non-compliant crawlers face penalties of $15,000 per day. The bill's practical significance lies in what it enables: mandatory identification is the precondition for any per-article billing scheme to function, because publishers cannot invoice an AI scraper they cannot identify by name.

A11292 was passed ten days before the UK's Movement for an Open Web launched its Search-Only Contracts mechanism (15 June 2026), which charges named AI crawlers £500 per article via county-court small-claims enforcement. MOW co-founder Tim Cowan has described the identification requirement as the enabling layer for the contracts to work. Without a law like A11292 compelling crawlers to identify themselves, the contractual penalty is effectively unenforceable against anonymous scraping bots.

New York as a legislative venue is significant: while the EU AI Act addresses training data and transparency at the model-development level, A11292 targets the data-collection layer directly, imposing an identification obligation at the point of scraping. If upheld and enforced, it would establish a precedent for crawler-identity requirements in the largest US media market. The bill's constitutional durability, given that web crawling is an interstate and international activity, remains to be tested.