Two Mississippi publishers were on Capitol Hill Sept. 29 to lobby in favor of the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, which would prohibit anyone from deploying a bot to access websites or online services in a way that is reasonably likely to damage, impair or burden them unless the bot identifies itself and discloses its purpose. The legislation targets deceptive or “stealth” web crawlers.
Mississippi Press President Peter Imes, publisher of The Commercial Dispatch, and Emmerich Newspapers President Wyatt Emmerich, a past president of the Association, were joined by Mississippi Press Executive Director Layne Bruce in calling on the offices of Sens. Roger Wicker and Cindy Hyde-Smith and Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi’s 2nd Congressional District to discuss the bill.
Wicker has agreed to author a Senate companion to the bill. Thompson confirmed he would sign on as a cosponsor of the House bill.
The Hill visits were part of the News/Media Alliance’s annual legislative fly-in, which brings newspaper publishers from across the country to Washington, D.C., to advocate for legislation aimed at strengthening and protecting local news.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced H.R. 9915, aimed at giving website operators greater transparency and control over automated software accessing their online content. The bill was introduced July 23 by Rep. Laurel Lee (R-Fla.), with Reps. Valerie Foushee (D-N.C.) and Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.) as original cosponsors. It would establish federal requirements for bots, including web crawlers, scrapers and AI agents.
The bill defines a “stealth bot” broadly as software that accesses a website or online service without disclosing its identity and purpose. Under the legislation, bots would have to identify themselves—including through an accurate user-agent string—and disclose how they intend to use information obtained from a website. The disclosure requirements specifically encompass activities such as text and data mining, search indexing, AI development, training, fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented generation.
H.R. 9915 would prohibit deploying such a bot in a manner reasonably likely to damage, impair or burden a website’s technical or commercial operations. It also would prohibit intentionally disguising a bot as a human user when it is being used in connection with a generative AI model or service. The legislation would authorize the Federal Trade Commission to pursue civil penalties and injunctions, while state attorneys general would have authority to bring certain actions on behalf of residents.
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