Museums sector warned of 'acute threat' posed by AI scraping bots

A new white paper based on 2026 University of Edinburgh research for the Ekip project warns that AI scraping bots impose substantial and unsustainable costs on cultural heritage institutions, straining digital infrastructure, engineering and cloud hosting budgets, and staff time. The report, Re:Commons: Renewing the Digital Commons for Cultural Heritage, says current policy debates dominated by copyright and licensing risk overlooking the infrastructural dimensions of the crisis, and recommends machine-readable rights-reservation standards, bot identification and transparency, compensation for infrastructure, and investment in shared public digital infrastructure.