Jan. 28, 2026, 3:09 p.m.Outlets like The Guardian and The New York Times are scrutinizing digital archives as potential backdoors for AI crawlers. As part of its mission to preserve the web, the Internet Archive operates crawlers that capture webpage snapshots. Many of these snapshots are accessible through its public-facing tool, the Wayback Machine. But as AI bots scavenge the web for training data to feed their models, the Internet Archive’s commitment to free information access has turned i...