Petition Urges NYT, Atlantic, USA Today to Stop Blocking the Wayback Machine

A public petition is pressuring major news outlets to reverse decisions that prevent the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine from preserving their journalism. Since February 2026, the New York Times has instructed the Archive to stop crawling its content, USA Today reportedly blocks archiving even of stories that themselves rely on Wayback Machine sources, and The Atlantic’s CEO has declined to commit to a fix. The publishers cite concerns about generative AI training as justification.

The petition argues that the AI rationale is misplaced: commercial AI scrapers routinely ignore publisher restrictions anyway, while the nonprofit Archive abides by them, making it a uniquely trustworthy preservation partner rather than a training-data threat. Organizers frame the blocks as undermining a decades-old public good that long predates the current AI boom.

The broader stake is resilience against censorship and revisionism. A neutral third-party archive protects reporting from quiet edits, takedowns, and pressure campaigns, and preserves the work of journalists in regions where reporters face violence. The signatories want outlet leadership to publicly commit to keeping their journalism in the Wayback Machine.