Apple Stands Firm on Ethical AI Practices, Says It Honors Publisher Rights

Apple Claims Clean Hands in AI Race – Is It the Only One Playing by the Rules?

By Muhammad Ahsen Aziz | Cheesy Science

In a tech landscape where artificial intelligence seems to be built on a mountain of copyright lawsuits and ethical grey zones, Apple is confidently positioning itself as the outlier—a company committed to ethical AI development. In a newly released research paper, Apple has doubled down on its claim: it doesn't use illegally scraped web content to train its AI models. While others face lawsuits and public backlash, Apple is saying, "We're doing it the right way."

A Shady Tradition in AI Training

The AI boom has brought incredible advancements, but at a steep ethical price. Companies like OpenAI and Microsoft have already faced lawsuits—most notably from The New York Times—for allegedly using copyrighted content to train their large language models (LLMs). And these aren’t isolated incidents. The industry has been repeatedly accused of exploiting online content without consent or compensation.

According to a 2025 report from TollBit, more than 26 million disallowed scrapes were recorded in a single month—meaning robots.txt files were ignored, deliberately or not.

Apple Takes a Different Road (Or So It Claims)

Back in 2023, Apple was already in talks with major publishers like Conde Nast and NBC News, reportedly offering millions for content licensing deals. Fast forward to 2025, Apple now insists:

"We believe in training our models using diverse and high-quality data. This includes data that we've licensed from publishers, curated from publicly available or open-sourced datasets, and publicly available information crawled by our web-crawler, Applebot."

Apple emphasizes that it does not use private user data in model training and follows robots.txt protocols to avoid scraping restricted sites.

Why Robots.txt Matters—And Why Many Ignore It

Robots.txt is a simple text file that tells bots which pages they can or can’t access. In theory, it should protect publishers. In practice? Many companies ignore it.

OpenAI vaguely refers to respecting crawler permissions, yet doesn’t confirm whether it consistently honors them. By Q1 2025, 13% of AI scraping ignored robots.txt—up from 3.3% in late 2024.

Apple claims its Applebot defaults to Googlebot’s rules if site-specific ones aren't found—adding another layer of compliance.

Are Publishers Buying It?

A 2023 study of 1,100+ news publishers revealed that over half had blocked AI crawlers. The BBC publicly stated its opposition to web crawlers like OpenAI’s. Meanwhile, AI startup Perplexity.ai (a rumored Apple acquisition target) was accused of scraping unauthorized content by Forbes in 2024, despite branding itself “ethical.”

Apple’s Clean Record: Real Ethics or Clever PR?

So far, Apple hasn’t faced the same legal scrutiny as its competitors. That may speak to actual ethical practices—or smart public relations. Either way, it’s working for now.

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📌 Final Thoughts

Apple wants to be seen as the ethical leader in the AI arms race. While others push boundaries (and get sued for it), Apple is promoting responsibility and consent. Whether that's driven by genuine values or calculated strategy—it’s effective.

Stay tuned to Cheesy Science for more updates on AI, tech ethics, and the companies shaping our digital future.