The Tech Billionaire Taking On AI Companies
Matthew Prince, CEO of cybersecurity giant Cloudflare, on why it's blocking bots that scrape content to train models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
Artificial Intelligence is fundamentally changing the internet. But Matthew Prince, CEO of cybersecurity giant Cloudflare, thinks there is a way to ensure content creators and publishers earn enough to operate — even as their work feeds AI.
Cloudflare has put up digital firewalls around its clients’ sites, which blocks the bots that copy content to train large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. It is then up to its customers to choose whether to allow those so-called AI “crawlers” to access their sites.
He hopes his decision will lead to a better deal for publishers as ‘search engines’ become ‘answer engines’ in the era of AI overviews and chatbots, which has an impact on website traffic.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has designated Google with strategic market status in general search, which includes AI Overview and AI Mode. But Google says “many of the ideas for interventions that have been raised in this process would inhibit UK innovation and growth, potentially slowing product launches at a time of profound AI-based innovation.” The company also disputes Matthew’s claim that traffic to websites has fallen since the launch of AI Overview.
Amol and Matthew also speak about the debate between artists like Sir Elton John and the UK government over plans to exempt technology firms from copyright laws.
Radical with Amol Rajan is a Today podcast for BBC Radio 4. Episode are released every Thursday and you can also listen to them on BBC Sounds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p0gg4k6r
