Poe, an AI chatbot platform owned by question-and-answer site Quora and backed by a Andreessen Horowitz’s $75 million investmentis providing users with downloadable HTML files of articles published by paywalled news outlets.
Request the service’s Assistant bot with the URL of this For example, a WIRED story about the AI-powered search service Perplexity plagiarizing one of our stories yielded a detailed, 235-word, 1MB summary. document contains an HTML snapshot of the entire article that users can download from Poe’s servers directly from the chatbot.
Similarly, WIRED can retrieve articles from paywalled sites including The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, Forbes, Defector and 404 Media in downloadable format simply by entering the URL. Assistant bot interface. This appears to be just the latest example of the AI industry’s cavalier approach to intellectual property law, which is rapidly undermining existing business models in sectors such as journalism and music.
“This is an important copyright issue,” James Grimmelmann, a professor of information and digital law at Cornell University, wrote in an email. “Because they made a copy on their own servers, it is clearly copyright infringement.” (Quora disputes this, comparing Poe to a cloud storage service.)
When asked to summarize the content of a test site run by my colleague Dhruv Mehrotra, the bot did not return a summary, but only an HTML file. According to the site’s server logs, shortly after the Assistant bot was prompted to summarize the site, a server claiming to be “Quora Bot” visited the site. It did not attempt to access the site’s robots.txt page, suggesting that Poe and Quora were ignoring the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a widely accepted though not legally binding web standard.
A prominent media executive, who WIRED granted anonymity to discuss a legally sensitive issue his company is actively investigating, said his publication also observed servers identifying themselves as Quora bots visiting their site shortly after prompting Poe’s chatbot for specific articles; these prompts, he said, brought up most or all of the content of those articles.
“Poe is a platform that allows users to ask questions and engage in back-and-forth dialogue with a variety of third-party AI-powered bots,” Quora spokesperson Autumn Besselman wrote in an email. “We do not have or train our own AI models. Poe has a feature that allows users to show the content of a URL to a bot, but the bot will only see content provided by the domain. We would be happy to connect with your engineering team to help them ensure your paywalled content is not available to Poe users.”
“Poe attachments are created at the direction of the user and operate similarly to cloud storage services, ‘read it later’ services, and ‘web clipper’ products, all of which we believe are compliant with copyright law,” Besselman wrote in a response to a follow-up email asking questions. Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to a request for comment.
