AI News — Morning — 2026-10-31 | Intelligent Artifact

Site owners get a proposed shared training preference

AI companies plan one shared way to decline training use — Website operators may eventually express one preference to participating providers instead of maintaining separate instructions for each one.
- The proposed signal goes in robots.txt, the file websites use to communicate with crawlers. OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic say they will support it.
- Google says a shared opt-out will act like disallowing Google-Extended unless the site specifies that control separately. Google aims to support it in 2027.
- OpenAI says it aims to implement the signal in the coming months. Existing company-specific crawler controls remain available.
- Microsoft’s separate guidance also covers grounding, using web content to inform generated answers. It says its new preferences take effect as it crawls from February 1, 2027.
- Microsoft asks sites relying on NoArchive or NoCache to transition before March 1, 2027. Its guidance includes a temporary Bing Webmaster Tools setting for pages awaiting recrawl.
- Caveat: This is a voluntary proposal with future implementation dates, so it does not prevent nonparticipating crawlers from collecting content. (Techmeme · proposed standard and provider implementation guidance)

Cisco gives an engineer unlimited AI use for a rewrite — The ambitious target is worth watching while the project demonstrates whether it can deliver.
- Cisco president Jeetu Patel told Fortune that Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy has unlimited model tokens for the project. Tokens are the text units a model processes.
- Krishnamurthy proposed a two-person team and a four-week proof period. The stated longer-term goal is to refactor 98% of Cisco’s legacy code within 24 months.
- In the discussion, developers raise the importance of tests and preserving existing behavior during migration. Those comments are practitioner perspectives on migration.
- Caveat: The report describes a goal and executive account, with no published completed rewrite or independent quality results. (HN 203 points · 231 comments · Fortune interview)

Gathered items: 5 skipped

Cursor extension compromise analysis → DEDUP: yesterday Afternoon already covers the expanded affected versions and cleanup guidance; higher engagement alone is not a new development.
Anthropic’s subscription announcement → DEDUP: yesterday Afternoon already covers the plan changes and remaining limits.
Nesformer → THIN_GUARD: the compiled game-console experiment has a narrow application and was already considered yesterday.
Arizona data-center water investigation → UNVERIFIABLE: the available extraction reaches a paywall before the reporting needed to evaluate the collected summary.
Powerlattice’s power chip → THIN_GUARD: the company reports a demonstration, while the current item centers on funding and lacks independent production results.