Three months ago, Apple announced a tool to make it easier for companies to opt out of AI training, and it appears that several major companies have taken advantage of it

Unlike Google, Apple is offering millions of dollars to companies to allow their AI to use crawlers to scour data and train Apple Intelligence As part of this agreement, companies can choose to exclude certain files from the AI's training This omission is controlled by the Applebots extension, which was originally released in 2015 and designed to crawl the Internet to power features like Siri and Spotlight, but has since been repurposed for training

Apple has included a new extension known as Applebot-extended that allows website owners to tell Apple not to use their data In a recent report, Wired lists several important companies that were excluded from the training These include The New York Times, Facebook, Instagram, Craigslist, Tumblr, Financial Times, The Atlantic, USE Today, and Conde Nast

According to Wired, two major studies show that about 6% to 7% of high-traffic websites block Applebot Interestingly, another analysis by journalist Ben Welsh shows that about a quarter of websites block Apple, while 53% of businesses block Open AI's bot, and Google Extend by Google AI is blocked by about 43%

Companies crawling sites for AI training has been a contentious issue recently, with Apple accused of stealing YouTube captions for AI training However, Apple has stated that data taken from the “pile,” the name given to the collected data, is not used for Apple Intelligence training It was also recently revealed that Apple originally trained AI on Google hardware, as described in a recent research paper

AI is now growing rapidly, and how companies collect data will be scrutinized It is important for Apple and other companies to provide companies with outs, especially since certain sites contain profiles and images of the general public

For more information about Apple Intelligence and what it brings to the table, you can check out the full breakdown of Apple's WWDC presentation