Cloudflare, the publicly traded cloud service provider, has launched a new, free tool to prevent bots from scraping websites hosted on its platform for data to train AI models.
Some AI vendors, including Google, OpenAI and Apple, allow website owners to block the bots they use for data scraping and model training by amending their site’s robots.txt, the text file that tells bots which pages they can access on a website. But, as Cloudflare points out in a post announcing its bot-combating tool, not all AI scrapers respect this.
Now taking bets on how long it will be before Cloudflare announces that they’re selling AI training datasets based off of the content they’re managing…
Would be rather short-sided of them. They rely on the free tier of their services for upscaling and word of mouth. People are already wary of the fact CF can snoop on what’s supposed to be private connections, but so far they’ve used that only for good.