News sites are blocking access to Internet Archive's Wayback Machine

News sites are blocking access to Internet Archive's Wayback Machine

From Marketplace Tech by Marketplace

April 21, 2026 · 7 min

About this episode

The episode discusses how some news sites are blocking access to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine due to concerns over AI companies using its content for training models.

The Wayback Machine is a project of the Internet Archive. It sends out web crawlers to take snapshots of the internet, creating a digital library of web pages. But now, some news publications are blocking its crawlers over concerns that AI companies will access the Wayback Machine’s publicly available archive and then train their AI models with the content. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes talked about this with Andrew Deck at Harvard's Nieman Lab.

People in this episode

Host: Stephanie Hughes

Guest: Andrew Deck

Topics covered

  • Internet Archive
  • Wayback Machine
  • web crawlers
  • news publications
  • AI training
  • digital library

Keywords

  • Wayback Machine
  • Internet Archive
  • web crawlers
  • news sites
  • AI
  • digital library
  • content access

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Internet Archive, Harvard's Nieman Lab, AI companies

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