Blocking the Internet Archive Won’t Stop AI, But It Will Erase the Web’s Historical Record

Major news publishers like The New York Times and The Guardian are blocking the Internet Archive's web crawlers, citing concerns about AI companies scraping their content. The EFF argues this is a misguided response: the Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library, not an AI company, and blocking it destroys decades of historical web records that journalists, researchers, and courts rely on. Courts have long recognized web archiving and search indexing as fair use, and sacrificing the public historical record to fight AI copyright battles would be an irreversible mistake.