Today we are launching Elthian AI Licensing Lite, a free WordPress plugin that lets any publisher state — clearly, explicitly, and in formats that automated systems actually read — how AI may interact with their content.

It is the simplest version of an idea we think matters: your site should be able to declare its own AI policy, and that declaration should be findable by the systems that need to see it.

The Problem We Are Solving

For most of the web, the question of AI usage is answered by silence. A crawler arrives, a model trains, a retrieval system embeds, an answer engine summarizes — and the publisher is rarely consulted, often unaware, and almost never positioned to push back. The terms of service buried three clicks deep in the footer were not built for any of this. They were written when “use” meant a human reading a page.

The standards that were built for this, RSL, robots.txt directives for AI, the llms.txt convention, structured policy headers, exist. They are just not present on most sites, because publishing them correctly across every channel a crawler might check is fiddly, easy to get wrong, and easy to forget when a theme update overwrites a file.

The Lite plugin closes that gap.

What It Does

You install it, choose a policy, and the plugin publishes that policy in every place an AI system is likely to look.

• llms.txt at the root of your site, written in the format large language model crawlers expect.
• A machine-readable JSON policy at /.well-known/ai-policy.json, the emerging convention for structured policy discovery.
• An AI license sitemap at /ai-license-sitemap.xml, listing every URL covered by the policy.
• HTTP response headers declaring the license alongside every page served.
• robots.txt augmentations aligned with the chosen policy.
• A frontend license badge on your site, linking out to the canonical, human-readable license page at elthian.com/licensing.

You choose the policy. The plugin handles every channel.

The Licenses

The Lite plugin ships with the core Elthian Licensing suite, a deliberate control ladder rather than a single switch:

• Elthian-NoAI — no AI access of any kind. Crawling, training, embeddings, product use, all prohibited. For sensitive, proprietary, paid, or personal content.
• Elthian-NoTrain — discovery and citation allowed; training prohibited. For publishers who want to be findable by AI search systems without their work being absorbed into model weights.
• Elthian-UseOnly — human-in-the-loop assistance allowed; expressive output prohibited. For internal copilots, enterprise assistants, and workflow tools that need to read content to help a human.
• Elthian-NonCommercial — AI use allowed only for non-commercial purposes. For academic, research, and non-profit contexts.
• Elthian-Public — broad reuse permitted, including commercial use and training. For open knowledge and public datasets.

Each license is documented, human-readable, and built on top of the work that organizations like the RSL consortium are doing to make AI permissions interoperable across the open web.

What It Is Not

The Lite plugin is not an enforcement system. It does not block crawlers, intercept training pipelines, or sue anyone on your behalf. We are deliberate about this distinction.

What the plugin does is make your policy declarable, discoverable, and provable. AI labs that respect declared permissions (and the list of labs doing so is growing) will see your policy and act accordingly. AI labs that do not respect declared permissions now operate in clearer legal territory: ignorance is no longer plausible when the policy is published in the formats they are known to read.

Clarity is the precondition for enforcement. The Lite plugin produces clarity.

Local Control, by Design

The Lite plugin runs entirely on your WordPress installation. No content is sent anywhere. Post bodies, comments, customer data, and analytics never leave your server.

An optional Registry Sync feature, disabled by default, allows you to register your declaration with the public Elthian registry — useful if you want your policy to be discoverable by crawlers and integrators outside the boundary of your own site. If you turn it on, you can see exactly what is sent: site identifier, site URL, the policy you selected, plugin and environment versions, and a timestamp. Nothing else. The data flow is documented in plain language in the plugin readme.

How to Install

The Lite plugin is free, GPL-licensed, and being submitted for inclusion in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory. In the meantime, you can download it directly from ElthianLabs, upload the ZIP through your WordPress plugin installer, and activate.

From there:

1. Go to Settings → Elthian AI Licensing.
2. Pick the policy that fits your site.
3. Save.

The plugin handles the rest. Within seconds, yoursite.com/llms.txt, /.well-known/ai-policy.json, and the sitemap are live. The HTTP headers are attached to every page served. Your policy is no longer a private intention. It is a published fact.

What Comes Next

The Lite plugin is the foundation. Elthian AI Licensing Pro, available separately, extends it with per-URL scope rules, signed policy snapshots, certificate issuance through the Elthian registry, advanced analytics, and multi-site management — the toolset for publishers, enterprises, and agencies that need not just a declared policy but verifiable, auditable evidence of that policy over time.

But Pro is optional, and Lite is fully functional on its own. If you publish to the web, you should at minimum be saying something about how your content may be used by AI systems. The Lite plugin is the easiest way we know to say it properly.

Install Elthian AI Licensing Lite →

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ElthianLabs is the development division of Elthian. We build software for creators and publishers operating in an AI-augmented world. Learn more about the broader licensing framework at elthian.com/licensing.