Internet standards body proposes new header field disclosing AI — will make it easier for machines to determine if AI was used on a site

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the body responsible for the standards used across the web, has just released a draft document that will introduce a new header to make it easier to determine whether AI was used on a web page. According to the AI Content Disclosure Header draft, this proposed metadata will make it easier for machines to determine how AI is involved in the production of a particular site for easier automation, indexing, and compliance.

“The goal of AI-Disclosure is to offer a low-overhead, easily parsable signal primarily for automated systems like web crawlers, archiving tools, or user agents that may need a quick indication of AI usage without processing complex manifests,” the draft document said. “This header is intended to be applied at the entire response level.”

There is no standardized, machine-readable way to determine if artificial intelligence was used in the creation of a site. While there are some existing ways to warn the consumer that content is AI-generated — either through written disclaimers on the page or watermarks on the video or image — these can’t be easily detected by machines and apps.

Information on the header will include mode, which tells whether AI was used on the page; model, which identifies what AI model was used to generate or modify the content; provider, which tells you what organization the model originated from; reviewed-by, which indicates who reviewed the content; and date, which applies the date and time the content was generated.

Mode has four values:

The group noted that this header information is just to guide the device accessing the information on its contents, and that you still need to rely on “more comprehensive mechanisms such as C2PA” to determine specifically which parts of the page use AI.

Aside from this, the header isn’t a secure field, so its contents may be modified by third parties or intermediaries. So, it shouldn’t be relied on for making security decisions. Nevertheless, the AI Content Disclosure Header is a quick and easy way for devices to determine the provenance of a particular page, helping machines know at a glance if the page they’re looking at has been touched by a machine or not.

Note that this is still in the draft stage — it’s not yet a standard, and adoption is purely voluntary. Still, if the internet body adopts this, it’s one more way we can determine if the content we’re looking at was created by people or sourced purely from AI.