Materials for journalists, editors, and researchers.

WARD (Web Access Rights Declaration), an open standard that lets website owners control how artificial intelligence accesses their content, today launched its public site and roadmap at getward.org. The standard is MIT-licensed, the monitoring SaaS is in production, and the first pilot integration is live.

Unlike robots.txt, which relies on bot compliance, WARD operates in three layers: a manifest file ( ward.json) declaring site-wide policy, HTML markup for element-level control, and server middleware that physically removes protected content before AI bots receive the page. The bot cannot ignore a rule it never sees.

“The EU AI Act gave content owners a right. The DSM Directive gave them a vocabulary. Neither gave them a protocol,” said Slava Spitsyn, founder of WARD. “robots.txt asked politely. WARD removes the content the AI bot is not allowed to take.”

The reference implementation (ward-protocol) ships with detection for 14 known AI crawlers from nine companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Perplexity, and Common Crawl. Regular search engines are not affected. The codebase has 42 passing tests.

WARD is built without venture capital — by design — following the Let's Encrypt and Linux Foundation model: public-interest grants fund the open standard, commercial services fund the organisation on top. Eleven grant applications are currently under review with EU and US funders, including NLnet, Mozilla Builders, OTF Internet Freedom Fund, the EU EIC Accelerator, and the German Forschungszulage R&D tax credit. Decisions arrive between May and October 2026.

WARD, the open standard for AI access control on the web, has been selected for the second jury round (Wertungsrunde 2) of the InnoStartBonus program run by futureSAX, the innovation initiative of the Free State of Saxony. Founder Slava Spitsyn will present WARD on 27 May 2026 at 11:00 at Impact Hub Dresden, Anton-Graff-Str. 20, with a 7-minute pitch followed by 7 minutes of Q&A in front of the Saxon State Ministry (SMWK) Fachgremium.

InnoStartBonus is a Saxon state startup grant supporting the early stage of innovative ventures based in Saxony. WARD is the only project in the round building open infrastructure for the emerging EU AI access-rights market.

“Saxony was once the heart of Germany's industrial revolution. Today we build the infrastructure of the next one,” said Spitsyn. “Visa builds the wallets for AI agents. WARD builds the access-rights grid that pairs with them. From Saxony, to the world.”

The jury decision is expected within several weeks. WARD is one of eleven public-interest funding applications the project has submitted in 2026 across EU and US funders.