Slava Spitsyn
Founder, WARD Protocol | AI Bot Access Control
About
I'm building WARD — an open standard that gives website owners technical control over AI bot access to their content.
The problem: EU law (AI Act Art. 53, DSM Directive Art. 4) gives website owners the right to control how AI crawlers use their data. But there's no standard mechanism to exercise that right. robots.txt is trust-based and binary — you can't say “show my page to visitors but remove personal data before serving it to AI bots.”
WARD solves this with 4 layers:
→ ward.json — machine-readable policy file
→ data-ward markup — tag sensitive content in HTML
→ Server enforcement — PII physically removed before the bot gets the page
→ Monitoring — see what every AI bot received
The standard is free and open source (MIT). The verification and monitoring services are commercial (getward.org).
I also run WebPrüfer — a free legal compliance scanner for German websites (DSGVO, Impressum, BFSG, 63 checks). It's the first website to implement WARD in production.
Currently applying for EU grants (NLnet, EIC) to develop WARD as an infrastructure standard for the AI era.
Based in Leipzig, Germany.
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