ai.txt: A Domain-Specific Language for Guiding AI Interactions with the Internet

Yuekang Li, Wei Song, Bangshuo Zhu, Dong Gong, Yi Liu, Gelei Deng, Chunyang Chen, Lei Ma, Jun Sun, Toby Walsh, Jingling Xue

Abstract: We introduce ai.txt, a novel domain-specific language (DSL) designed to explicitly regulate interactions between AI models, agents, and web content, addressing critical limitations of the widely adopted robots.txt standard. As AI increasingly engages with online materials for tasks such as training, summarization, and content modification, existing regulatory methods lack the necessary granularity and semantic expressiveness to ensure ethical and legal compliance. ai.txt extends traditional URL-based access controls by enabling precise element-level regulations and incorporating natural language instructions interpretable by AI systems. To facilitate practical deployment, we provide an integrated development environment with code autocompletion and automatic XML generation. Furthermore, we propose two compliance mechanisms: XML-based programmatic enforcement and natural language prompt integration, and demonstrate their effectiveness through preliminary experiments and case studies. Our approach aims to aid the governance of AI-Internet interactions, promoting responsible AI use in digital ecosystems.

External IDs:dblp:journals/corr/abs-2505-07834