{"slug": "is-msnbot-being-used-to-train-ai-models", "title": "Is msnbot being used to train AI models?", "summary": "A website operator reports that Microsoft's retired msnbot crawler has been reactivated in 2026 and is aggressively downloading pages in a pattern consistent with AI training, despite the operator setting a meta tag to block bingbot from AI training. The operator verified the source IP addresses as genuine and seeks information on why msnbot is active again.", "body_md": "(Summary: msnbot seems to be downloading my website for training an AI model)\n\nThe msnbot was retired a decade ago for indexing the web, replaced by bingbot. You can tell bingbot not to train AI models by setting a meta tag eg .\n\nA month ago I started using this tag for bingbot. After this the defunct msnbot starting hitting my website HARD. I've verified the source IP addresses, and they are genuine.\n\nThe pattern of pages being indexed is clearly for AI. Search engines and AI indexers slurp my content in different ways. msnbot appears to be taking the data in a way that AI indexers do.\n\nI can't find any information about this, or any reason why msnbot has been reactivated in 2026.\n\nI'm hoping some people can help!\n\nComments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49320686](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49320686)\n\nPoints: 1\n\n# Comments: 0", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/is-msnbot-being-used-to-train-ai-models", "canonical_source": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49320686", "published_at": "2026-08-16 14:54:53+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-16 15:10:54.872772+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-policy"], "entities": ["Microsoft", "msnbot", "bingbot"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/is-msnbot-being-used-to-train-ai-models", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/is-msnbot-being-used-to-train-ai-models.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/is-msnbot-being-used-to-train-ai-models.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/is-msnbot-being-used-to-train-ai-models.jsonld"}}