• by Colin Kirkland , Yesterday

In a move against the ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) boom, Patreon has partnered with internet infrastructure company Cloudflare in order to block automated bots (or “crawlers”) from using creators’ work published on the platform to train AI models with. 

On Thursday, Patreon CEO Jack Conte posted a message on Instagram announcing the partnership. “Creators deserve credit, compensation, and consent,” Conte wrote, adding that "if that’s not on the table" the crawlers can stay off Patreon's platform.

“As AI agents become increasingly powerful and popular, creators deserve a meaningful say in how their work is used by AI companies,” Drew Rowny, Patreon’s senior vice president of product, stated in a recent Cloudflare statement. 

According to Rowny, Patreon’s work with Cloudflare aims to restrict known AI training crawlers at the network level, “while still allowing the crawlers that help creators get discovered and grow their businesses through search.”

Cloudflare’s feature displaying bot versus human-generated search requests shows that 57.4% of requests are currently initiated by automated bots, while only 42.6% come from human users. 

“Humans might browse five websites before making a purchase, however, while an AI service might browse 5,000 websites,” notes a recent report by NBC. 

In response to this unprecedented increase in agentic web traffic, Cloudflare now allows website owners to block AI crawlers based on whether they are categorized as search bots, agents, or training crawlers.

Starting in September, the tech company will begin blocking training and agent bots by default on pages that run ads. 

“The free internet is alive and happening,” Conte writes. “The rebellion has already started.”