Patreon has announced a significant escalation in its efforts to protect creator content from unauthorized use by artificial intelligence companies. The platform is moving away from a passive approach, transitioning from simply asking bots not to scrape to actively blocking them.
A Partnership with Cloudflare
To implement these new defenses, Patreon is collaborating with Cloudflare. This partnership enables the platform to identify and block bots that attempt to harvest data for training AI models. By utilizing Cloudflare's security tools, Patreon aims to provide a more robust shield for the intellectual property of its creators.
Moving Beyond robots.txt
Historically, many websites have relied on the robots.txt file—a set of instructions that tells web crawlers which parts of a site they can or cannot visit. However, as AI development has accelerated, many companies have ignored these voluntary directives. Patreon’s shift to active blocking signals a growing trend among content platforms to enforce stricter controls over how their data is used in the age of generative AI.
