From the start, robots.txt has always been an indicator of a site's preference with no actual legal significance.
replywget ignores robots.txt outside of recursive mode. I think it's correct to do so, and I think an AI loading a handful of pages in response to a command should be about the same.
replyIf a new directive was introduced that allows for an explicit setting in robots.txt, do you think the bros would follow it anyway? Something like `ALLOW AGENTS` or `DISALLOW AGENTS`
replyThe "Bros"? Maybe.
replyI wouldn't want them to. The whole point of using agents to do stuff on the web for me, is for them to do the stuff on the web for me.
This is the reverse of "do not track" case. It'll not be effective because every service will set it to DISALLOW by default anyway, because it costs them nothing, and for most services, it actually is what they want anyway - most of businesses on the web are making money on wasting people's time, and for that, they need to force themselves on people; end-user automation defeats that, so they actively fight it (and complain a lot).