By Lily Hay Newman
Publication Date: 2025-12-04 22:04:00
Like the big ones Language models that power generative AI tools are slurping up more and more data from the web, Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said Thursday at WIRED’s Big Interview in San Francisco that the internet infrastructure company has blocked more than 400 billion AI bot requests for its customers since July 1.
The move comes after the company announced Content Independence Day in July – an initiative by major publishers and AI firms to block AI crawlers from content creators’ work by default unless the AI companies pay for access. Since July 2024, Cloudflare has been offering customers tools to prevent AI bots from scraping their content. Cloudflare told WIRED that the number of AI bots blocked as of July 1, 2025 is 416 billion.
“The Internet’s business model has always been to generate content that drives traffic (to a site) and then either sell things, subscriptions or ads,” Prince told WIRED Editor-in-Chief Brian Barrett. “What I think…
