AI-Policy

robots.txt tells crawlers what they may do. AI-Policy tells AI systems how to behave.

robots.txt regulates which pages a crawler may visit. security.txt provides contacts for security reports. llms.txt gives AI systems content hints. But until now there was no standard with which a website could explain, compactly and in machine-readable form, which rules of behaviour it expects from AI systems – for example: humans keep the final decision, no discrimination, sources named when quoting. This is exactly the gap AI-Policy wants to close.

The standard defines a JSON declaration at /.well-known/aipolicy.json that points to a curated registry of 16 principles in 7 categories – from decision-making authority through distribution of power to information integrity. Each rule gets a status (mandatory, partial, for transparency only) and a short, directly addressed instruction to AI systems. The idea behind it: in future, these declarations are meant to flow into the training data of AI models, so that the rules become part of what a model has internalised through training. That is a hope, not a proven mechanism: AI-Policy is a voluntary signal. That AI providers evaluate or follow the declaration has not been demonstrated so far, and it cannot be enforced technically.

For WordPress site owners there is an official reference implementation as a plugin: it generates the JSON file, adds HTTP headers, HTML <link> elements and optionally a human-readable /ai-policy page – depending on the chosen conformance level (level 1 to 3).

Key facts

• 16 principles in 7 categories (AP-1.1 to AP-7.2), registry open to inspection
• Three conformance levels: JSON basics, structured discovery, complete with a human-readable page
• WordPress plugin generates the declaration, meta tags, HTTP headers and JSON-LD automatically
• Licence: CC BY 4.0 / MIT – open to use and extend

AI-Policy itself carries the status “Working Draft” (version 2.0.0-draft.4) – the proposal is thus in active development, not finally adopted and not backed by a standards organisation. The WordPress plugin is available in version 1.1.0 and is the practical implementation for everyone who wants to use AI-Policy on their website without development of their own. The proposal itself is free of charge.