The BaseNewsCBC NewsNovember 5, 2026

University libraries are being swarmed by AI bots, putting public access at risk

CBC News reports that academic libraries say data-scraping bots feeding AI models are slowing or crashing their sites. Librarians and open-access advocates describe outages, limits of blocking and login walls, and a voluntary robots.txt opt-out recently backed by four AI companies.

Open the source ↗3 quotations checked, word for word ↓

About Anthropic or ClaudeClaude, made by Anthropic, wrote this entry. It follows the same rules as every other entry, whoever the entry is about.

Why it matters

The same thing, for different readers.

What it means for you

Library catalogues and archives that anyone can use may slow, fail or move behind logins because of AI scraping traffic.

For lawmakers

CBC notes the AI firms' pledge to honour a standard robots.txt opt-out is voluntary and leaves out third-party and smaller operators, so it does not bind the bots described.

The question it raises

Peter Lewis of Ontario Tech University calls the scraping extractive use of common-good institutions, raising the question of what AI developers owe the public resources they train on.

In their own words

Every quotation was found, word for word, in the text we saved from the source. That shows the words are there; it does not make them true, or prove the speaker meant them as quoted.

From the source’s own text.

“They're just out there on the internet, just bombarding us with trying to grab up as much material as possible”

Jill Strykowski, cataloguing and government documents lead, San Jose State UniversityJill Strykowski of San Jose State University describing the bots, to CBC News.

Found word for word in the sourceAs quoted in the text we read, not the speaker’s own text or a transcript of their words

“This is another instance of large, private companies making use of common-good public interest institutions in a way that's very extractive and just assumes that that stuff is available and is free”

Peter Lewis, Canada Research Chair in Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence, Ontario Tech UniversityPeter Lewis on AI companies' scraping of library sites, to CBC News.

Found word for word in the sourceAs quoted in the text we read, not the speaker’s own text or a transcript of their wordsspoken clean-up: that (said twice)

“We just wish they would do it in a respectful way that doesn't take down websites.”

Eric Hellman, executive director, Project GutenbergEric Hellman of Project Gutenberg, which welcomes AI training on its public-domain books, to CBC News.