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Not automatically—and not in every legal sense. In the United States, a website’s no-scraping notice is not a universal statute or court order. Whether an AI company may face liability depends on what it accessed, how it accessed it, what terms it agreed to, what it copied and did with the material, and which law and court apply. A Ninth Circuit decision says the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) does not treat access to public website pages as unauthorized merely because the site objects. That ruling does not grant blanket permission to scrape: contract, copyright, privacy, and state-law claims may still matter.
What does a no-scraping notice legally do?
A notice can communicate the site operator’s objection, but the notice alone does not answer whether scraping is unlawful. Its legal effect depends on the claim being made and the circumstances—for example, whether the page is open to the public or behind a login, whether the crawler agreed to posted terms, and whether it bypassed a technical access control.
It helps to distinguish four things that are sometimes grouped together as “a no-scraping notice”:
- A robots.txt instruction: a machine-readable request telling compliant crawlers which paths the site asks them not to fetch. It is not, by itself, a login or technical barrier.
- Posted terms of service: contractual language may restrict scraping, but whether it binds a particular company depends on facts such as how the terms were presented and whether the company agreed to them.
- A click-through agreement: an affirmative acceptance can provide stronger evidence of agreement than a notice a visitor merely encounters, though the agreement’s scope and enforceability still matter.
- An individualized cease-and-desist letter: it makes the operator’s objection explicit. It may affect contract or state-law arguments, but it does not by itself turn every visit to a public page into a CFAA violation.
These distinctions matter because a ruling about one legal theory—such as unauthorized access under the CFAA—does not dispose of separate claims about copying, contract, privacy, or circumvention of technical controls.
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How the main U.S. legal theories differ
| Legal theory | What the notice or access method may mean | Key limit |
|---|---|---|
| CFAA | In its April 18, 2022 opinion in hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp., the Ninth Circuit said the CFAA’s concept of access “without authorization” does not apply to public websites merely because the operator objects. | This is a Ninth Circuit ruling about public access and the CFAA, not a nationwide permission to scrape or a ruling on every other claim. |
| DMCA Section 1201 | In a December 18, 2025 pleading-stage order, the Southern District of New York concluded that the robots.txt allegations before it did not establish a technological measure that effectively controlled access to the publishers’ works. | The order concerned Section 1201 and the allegations in that litigation. It does not decide copyright infringement, contract, or state-law claims generally. |
| Contract | Terms that prohibit scraping may support a contract claim if they formed an agreement binding the scraper. | A posted restriction, click-through agreement, and individualized notice are not interchangeable; formation, scope, and the parties matter. |
| Copyright and other claims | Copying expressive works, personal information, or other protected material may raise issues distinct from whether a page was publicly reachable. | Legality depends on the material, amount copied, use, and applicable law. The cited decisions do not establish a categorical answer for AI training. |
What hiQ v. LinkedIn says about public pages
The Ninth Circuit’s April 18, 2022 opinion concerned scraping of public LinkedIn profiles and LinkedIn’s contention that continued access after a cease-and-desist letter violated the CFAA. The court framed the statute around access restrictions and distinguished information available to the general public from information behind an authorization gate. It wrote that “the concept of ‘without authorization’ does not apply to public websites.”
That sentence is about the CFAA and public websites in the Ninth Circuit’s analysis. It does not mean a scraper may ignore all site rules or copy any material without consequence. The opinion itself identified other possible avenues for website operators, including copyright infringement, misappropriation, unjust enrichment, conversion, breach of contract, breach of privacy, and state-law trespass-to-chattels claims. It also recognized that operators can use technological self-help against harmful intrusions or attacks.
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For a scraper, the practical dividing line in this CFAA analysis is not simply whether the site has said “no.” Whether material is genuinely available to the public, or instead sits behind a login or other authorization gate, matters. Other laws and claims can still turn on the notice, the data, and the method of access.
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Does robots.txt legally prevent AI training?
Not by itself under the specific Section 1201 analysis described in the Southern District of New York’s December 18, 2025 order. Judge Sidney H. Stein denied Ziff Davis leave to file a proposed amended complaint, concluding that the allegations did not show that robots.txt files effectively controlled access to the publishers’ copyrighted works. The court reasoned that a bot could retrieve the pages without using a credential or defeating a technical gate; it could simply disregard the instruction. The order compared the instruction to a request to “keep off the grass.”
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This was a district-court ruling on a proposed complaint in particular litigation, not a general ruling that robots.txt has no legal significance. It addressed whether the alleged instruction qualified as an effective access control for a DMCA Section 1201 claim. The Copyright Office describes Section 1201 as generally prohibiting circumvention of technological measures used to prevent unauthorized access to copyrighted works, while providing a process for limited temporary exemptions. A crawler instruction, a contractual promise, and an actual technical barrier are different things.
So robots.txt may tell a well-behaved crawler what the operator wants it to do, but the cited order did not treat ignoring that file as circumvention of an effective technical barrier on the allegations before the court. That does not resolve whether the same conduct violates a contract or infringes copyright.
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Are copies made for AI training automatically fair use or infringement?
No categorical answer is established here. Copyright questions concern more than whether a page was public or whether a crawler followed robots.txt. The nature of the material, how much was copied, how it was retained or used, and the downstream use can matter to distinct claims.
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The U.S. Copyright Office launched an initiative to analyze copyrighted material used for AI training. It released a pre-publication Part 3 on generative AI training on May 9, 2025, and said a final version would follow without expected substantive changes to its analysis or conclusions. That status reflects an active legal and policy issue; it does not establish that all AI training is fair use or that every training copy infringes.
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What should a website operator or AI company check?
For a real scraping dispute, separate the questions rather than treating “the site said no” as the whole analysis:
- Identify what was accessed. Was it an ordinary public page, a login-protected page, a restricted endpoint, or material behind a technical access control? The public-page distinction was central to the Ninth Circuit’s CFAA analysis; access controls are separately relevant to the DMCA question.
- Identify the notice and any agreement. Check whether the issue is a robots.txt instruction, posted terms, an accepted click-through agreement, or a direct cease-and-desist letter. Determine whether an agreement was formed, whom it binds, and what conduct it covers.
- Identify the legal claim. Ask whether the dispute concerns CFAA access, DMCA anti-circumvention, copyright, contract, privacy, or a state-law theory. A decision on one claim is not an answer to the others.
- Trace what happened to the material. Consider whether it contained expressive works or personal information, how much was copied, whether it was retained, and how it was used for training or in model outputs. Those facts can matter independently of access.
- Check the jurisdiction and procedural posture. The hiQ decision is from the Ninth Circuit; the robots.txt order is from the Southern District of New York and concerned a pleading-stage request. Neither alone settles every U.S. dispute.
If a company has received a demand letter or faces a threatened claim, the outcome can turn on the precise access method, contract formation, location, and material involved. A qualified technology or intellectual-property lawyer can assess those facts and the claims actually asserted.
Why an AI company’s own data promises are a separate issue
The FTC’s January 2024 guidance addresses model-as-a-service companies’ commitments to their customers, including promises made through website terms and other channels. It warns that using or retaining consumer data for other purposes without clear notice and affirmative express consent can create legal risk. This guidance concerns an AI service’s own customer commitments and data practices; it does not decide whether every outside website’s no-scraping notice binds a third-party crawler.
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