Matthew Prince Wants AI Companies to Pay for Their Sins (www.wired.com)

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is pushing a sharp rethinking of how AI models access the web: his company has rolled out tools to block unauthorized AI scraping and to enforce a de facto pay‑per‑crawl model that forces large language‑model builders to pay sites for access to content. This follows Cloudflare’s broader evolution from a “neutral” internet middleman to an active gatekeeper — a role it signaled years ago when it cut service to The Daily Stormer — and reflects Prince’s view that the web has never truly been “free” and creators deserve payment for their work. For the AI/ML community this is a structural change. Many LLMs are trained on massive, indiscriminately scraped corpora; Cloudflare’s edge‑level detection and crawl‑control tools inject technical and economic friction into that pipeline. Practically, expect more licensed datasets, negotiated data‑feeds or crawler tokens, higher training costs, and tighter provenance requirements — which could improve compensation and provenance but also constrain reproducibility and increase barriers for research. Legally and ethically, it shifts the debate from theoretical fair use to enforceable network controls, pushing model builders to either negotiate, adapt collection strategies, or rely on curated/open alternatives.