IETF | Progress on AI Preferences

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In October 2026, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) held a two-day workshop in Prague with people who are deploying post-quantum authentication. These are the first impressions from the co-chairs, ahead of the full workshop report.
Email is the oldest widely used application on the Internet, but it continues to evolve. At IETF 127 four working groups will meet to improve the security and usability of mail, and two Birds-of-a-Feather sessions propose improvements in mail operations and the way users sign up for mail subscriptions.
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Several new features implemented on RFC-Editor.org aim to make the site more useful and engaging for RFC consumers.
In January, the IETF chartered the AI Preferences (AIPREF) Working Group to make it easier to express how AI models should use Internet content. With a compressed timeline for delivery, it’s a good time to update those who haven't been following the work closely.
While the first official meeting of the AIPREF working group was at IETF 122 in Bangkok, we recognise that many interested parties weren't able to make it, especially given that the group was formed just beforehand. We also needed more time than an hour or two at an IETF meeting would have afforded. So, in early April we held an interim meeting in Brussels.
At that meeting, we converged on several important ideas. First, we'd start with a very simple vocabulary of terms that describe preferences, and we'd define a way to attach them to content using robots.txt and HTTP headers.
In the subsequent weeks, we adopted two documents as starting points for these work items:
Together, these Internet-Drafts (I-Ds) describe how websites could indicate preferences about how content is used for training generative and non-generative AI, search, and inference-time AI usages. With these updates, sites would be able to target specific uses, using the new Content-Usage mechanism in robots.txt and/or HTTP headers, instead of targeting all or specific crawlers.
Those are just starting points, however. We're still discussing a number of aspects of them, including the need to have vocabulary terms for things like inference-time use of content, how search can be related to AI usage, and other details of the I-Ds (notably, how the ”Text and Data Mining” (TDM) terminology is used).
Another area where we need more discussion is how preferences should be combined. Since we're defining more than one attachment mechanism and it's likely that others will be defined outside our processes, we need to be able to reconcile them so that their effect is predictable and sensible.
See the issues list for more details, but note that creating new issues is reserved for the chairs and editors, so if you see something missing, please bring it up on the mailing list.
In Brussels, we realised that managing expectations—both by content owners and policymakers—about what these mechanisms can and cannot do is going to be critical. For example, a preference on content is only the preference of the person who put it there; it is not legally enforceable on its own, and that person may or may not have the legal right to control its use. Therefore, a preference cannot be blindly followed, nor can it absolve an AI vendor who forgoes due diligence when creating a model.
Likewise, preferences are just that: they aren’t technically enforced. That’s something that the legal regime that they operate in will need to take up. It's likely we'll try to document these and other limitations as the work progresses.
We also recognise that the IETF process is new to many stakeholders. In particular, some policymakers are keenly interested in the potential outcomes of this work. So, to help them understand how it is progressing, we've been giving updates to a few interested regulators.
Our charter has very ambitious milestones for this work: we want to submit the I-Ds to the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) for publication as a Proposed Standard in August 2025. That accele