New York Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act (2026)

State of New York — S9934 / A11292, the NEW YORK STEALTH CRAWLER PROHIBITION ACT, passed by both houses and delivered to Gov. Kathy Hochul; NOT ENACTED as of 2026-09-15. CORE OBLIGATION: any CRAWLER accessing a COVERED NEWS SOURCE must DISCLOSE ITS IDENTITY AND PURPOSE before or at the time of access. PENALTY: deploying a stealth crawler in a manner that DAMAGES OR ECONOMICALLY HARMS a news publisher is a CIVIL VIOLATION carrying penalties of UP TO $15,000 PER DAY. FIRST IN THE NATION: no other state has enacted a crawler-identification mandate. POLICY FRAME: protection of local journalism against unidentified automated scraping, principally by AI developers building training corpora and retrieval systems. ORGANISED OPPOSITION, which is the reason this entry is worth recording in full: the ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION, the CENTER FOR DEMOCRACY & TECHNOLOGY and more than a dozen further civil society organisations — 19 groups total — formally urged the Governor to VETO. Their stated objections: (a) the bill effectively DEANONYMIZES AND CRIMINALIZES AUTOMATED ACCESS TO THE OPEN WEB; (b) it THREATENS ANONYMOUS ACCESS TO INFORMATION; (c) it COMPELS SPECULATIVE DISCLOSURES, since a crawler must state a 'purpose' that may not be fixed at the time of access; (d) it EXPOSES RESEARCHERS, JOURNALISTS, WATCHDOGS AND ORDINARY USERS TO LIABILITY for using automated tools to read the open web. WHY THIS MATTERS BEYOND NEW YORK: most AI-adjacent measures in this dataset restrict what a system may DO with data. This one restricts HOW a system may READ publicly accessible pages, and does so through an identification mandate rather than a use restriction. If enacted it would apply to any crawler reaching a New York news site regardless of where the operator sits, and the civil-liberties objection is that the same mechanism reaches non-commercial and accountability uses indistinguishably from commercial scraping. PROCEDURAL EXPECTATION: commentary held that the Governor was unlikely to act on any passed bill until after the NOVEMBER 7, 2026 GUBERNATORIAL ELECTION. COMPANION NEW YORK ACTIVITY: New York moved on SURVEILLANCE PRICING in the same period; the indexed measures include New York Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act (personalized prices need a label).