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On October 30, 2026, Microsoft announced that it will join OpenAI and Google in supporting a unified standard within the robots.txt protocol, enabling web publishers to opt out of generative artificial intelligence model training with a single site--level directive. The mechanism utilizes the "__usage_ai--training" policy token defined in an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) draft to streamline publisher consent and mitigate ongoing intellectual property and data--scraping disputes across commercial AI datasets. Microsoft confirmed that it will formally begin honoring the opt--out preference across its web--crawling infrastructure on February 1, 2027.