Patreon Just Nuked AI Scrapers: Why This Is a Turning Point for Creators
I keep coming back to the cat-and-mouse game between creators and AI scrapers. For months, it felt like asking nicely with a robots.txt file was enough. But Patreon just shut the door completely, moving to active Cloudflare-based blocking.
What gets me isn't just the technical move — it's the shift in power. When platforms start treating scraping as an attack rather than just 'web traffic', the ecosystem changes. This isn't just about a few training bots; it's about setting the boundary that the open web doesn't mean a free-for-all for training data. I suspect we're going to see a lot more of this, and honestly? It's about time creators got to decide whether their work fuels the next model or stays private.
I’m genuinely curious to see how long this line holds before the scrapers find a new way around, but for today, the wall is up.
Related
More from the blog
Camera-Less Smart Glasses: Even Realities Bets Productivity Beats Recording Everyone
Even Realities G2 drops the camera entirely — betting a private display for productivity beats recording everyone around you.
Anthropic's Opus 5 Is About Efficiency, Not Magic
Opus 5 costs the same as 4.8 but delivers more per token — a reminder that AI progress is increasingly about squeezing better outputs out of what we already have.
Platforms Are Splitting on What Counts as Authentic
Substack just launched AI authorship labels while Deezer reports over half of daily uploads are AI-generated — and no platform agrees on how to solve it.
The $750 Billion Question: AI CapEx Has Gone Off the Rails
AI infrastructure spending ballooned to $750B for OpenAI alone, and nobody can say what the end state looks like.