What is AI2Bot ?
AI2Bot is a web crawler operated by the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), a non-profit research institute. According to its official disclosure at allenai.org, AI2Bot is designed to collect publicly available data from the web for use in research and development of open large language models (LLMs). The bot respects standard web crawling practices and aims to support transparency in data sourcing for model training.
Who is operating AI2Bot ?
AI2Bot is operated by the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), an independent research organization based in Seattle, Washington. Founded by the late Paul Allen, AI2 is known for its work in natural language processing, computer vision, and open science initiatives. More information about the institute is available at Allenai.org.
Why you should be interested in AI2Bot ?
For webmasters, the relevance of AI2Bot lies in its role in AI model training. Pages crawled by this bot may be used to train open-access LLMs. The Allen Institute emphasizes ethical data sourcing and transparency, but site owners concerned with data usage should review their content exposure. Since AI2Bot declares its identity clearly in user-agent headers, it can be controlled via robots.txt and filtering mechanisms.
How to block AI2Bot ?
1. Robots.txt File:
Add the following rule to your robots.txt file:
# block AI2Bot User-agent: AI2Bot Disallow: /
2. IP Filtering:
Monitor server access logs and block IPs associated with AI2Bot if needed, though user-agent filtering is usually sufficient.
3. User-Agent Blocking:
Configure your server (Apache, Nginx, etc.) to block the user-agent string “AI2Bot”.
About the bot
Owner: Allen Institute for AI
Owner URL: allenai.org
Bot URL: allenai.org/policies/ai2bot
Bot User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; AI2Bot; +https://allenai.org/policies/ai2bot)
Respects robots.txt: Yes
