Spawning AI offers ai.txt, a proposed web standard that lets website owners declare machine-readable permissions specifying whether their site's content can be used to train AI models.

ai.txt is a plain-text file placed at a website's root directory, similar to the established robots.txt standard for search engine crawlers. Unlike robots.txt — which is read when a page is crawled — ai.txt is designed to be read when a site's media is downloaded for training purposes. Spawning's API communicates ai.txt permissions to its partner network, including Hugging Face and Stability AI. Spawning also released a generator tool and a WordPress plugin to make creating ai.txt files accessible to non-technical users. The standard was proposed in May 2023.