 | | The DL: Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Google all had seats at the table alongside 35 publishers at the IAB Tech Lab’s LLM working group in NYC last Thursday. The clearest action point: the initiative has shifted to weekly meetings as it races to find standards on how AI uses and pays for content. To block or not to block remained a dominant topic of discussion during the hour-long workshop, with some publishers wanting to take a harder line on “getting the LLMs’ attention enough to cut a deal." One priority: creating better content classification and structured data taxonomies, which makes it easier for AI systems and search engines to understand and correctly cite content, and ensures that when AI crawlers are allowed in, they can scrape publisher sites more efficiently. The IAB Tech Lab’s framework is more focused on the full spectrum of access models for LLMs, than RSL (Really Simple Licensing), which is more of a licensing language, but there is potential for them to dovetail. The key questions are how access is locked, tracked, and monetized across that lifecycle. As for publishers, they don’t really care who wins the LLM standards race. This is a global, market-wide issue which needs a neutral framework where publishers, retailers and big tech all sit at the same table. The synopsis was there needs to be a clear, purpose-driven identification of crawlers to manage them securely and responsibly in the future.
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