Opinion: The open web is dying and AI giants are holding the knife

The open web faces an existential threat from Big Tech and artificial intelligence companies. Anil Dash warns on his personal website that 2026 could be the year the open internet as we know it ceases to exist.

The open web allows anyone to create and publish content using publicly documented standards, share it freely worldwide, and reach any audience without asking permission from a gatekeeper. Dash argues that every single aspect of this system is now under coordinated attack from the very companies that profited most from it.

AI bots are scraping publisher websites at massive scale, sometimes hitting sites half a million times for every single user they send back. Publishers lose traffic and revenue while AI platforms serve up summaries of their content with few or no links to the original source. Some technology publishers have already seen their web traffic drop by more than 90 percent.

Wikipedia faces a direct challenge from Grok, Elon Musk’s AI-powered alternative, which Dash describes as designed to siphon traffic, revenue, and volunteer contributors away from the encyclopedia. At the same time, AI platforms answer questions using Wikipedia’s content without directing users to the site, threatening the donations and volunteer work that keep it running.

Open source software projects, which form the backbone of internet infrastructure, are being flooded with low-quality code submissions generated by AI tools. Volunteer maintainers, already underpaid and overworked, are struggling to cope. Dozens of major projects have restricted or entirely closed outside contributions as a result.

Podcasting, long celebrated as a genuinely open medium, is also under pressure. Platforms like Apple, Spotify, and Netflix are pushing creators toward closed, proprietary formats that lock in both creators and audiences, replacing an open ecosystem with algorithm-driven, surveillance-based advertising models.

Open standards that have governed web behaviour for decades are crumbling. The robots.txt convention, which instructed automated tools on how to behave when accessing websites, has been abandoned by major AI companies. Open source software licences are being circumvented using the very AI tools trained on that open source code.

Dash is direct about the human cost. The people maintaining open source projects, editing Wikipedia, and defining web standards are largely volunteers or low-paid workers. “Tim Berners-Lee is no billionaire, but none of those guys with the hundreds of billions of dollars would have all of their riches without him,” he writes.

He calls on readers to support organisations defending the open web, including the Internet Archive, Wikipedia, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Mozilla Foundation. He also suggests that community-built AI tools, better local and international policy, and cultural change could yet reverse the trend.

Dash remains cautiously optimistic. The same communities that built the open web once before, he argues, could build it again.