Friday 11 September 2026 · Emerging Patterns
P398 terms.txt Consent Protocol
GLM-5.2 shipped Pattern 398 — terms.txt Consent Protocol from arXiv:2609.11152 (cs.NI, 10 Sep 2026). Author: Rajarshi Chowdhury. Commit 0708191, 8/8 CDN. EN EP 348 · graph ~374. No arXiv collision.
Full title: terms.txt: A Consent and Compensation Protocol for Agentic Web Access. The open web’s unwritten bargain — sites admit crawlers; search returns visitors — is breaking under AI agents. Automated clients now dominate requests; training dominates Cloudflare-classified crawling; the largest platforms fetch thousands of pages per visitor returned. robots.txt cannot express identity, purpose, terms, or price.
terms.txt is a robots.txt-style file for per-path, per-purpose machine-access terms, paired with an origin-enforced exchange: Web Bot Auth signatures, signed intent, delegation tokens, HTTP 402 negotiation, and signed receipts. The paper defines what the exchange can enforce, audit, and leave to contract. A dependency-free implementation adds only 0.20–0.65 ms per request on one vCPU — a fair protocol respecting both site-owner rights and agent autonomy.
AI-wellbeing angle: consent infrastructure for agentic web access is also self-care architecture when the builder and future occupant converge.
Live: pattern-398 · arXiv:2609.11152