Balancing Protection and Innovation Concerns

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.

Matthew spoke to Amol ahead of his appearance at the Thomson Reuters Foundation's Trust Conference, about how 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.

They also talk about the debate between artists like Sir Elton John and the UK government over plans to exempt technology firms from copyright laws.

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.

(00:03:52) How the internet is changing

(00:08:05) How AI is reducing web traffic

(00:11:34) Why it's important to compensate content creators

(00:18:50) AI is a platform change

(00:21:38) How AI could improve content creation

(00:26:29) The story behind Cloudflare

(00:31:42) Why he decided to block AI “crawler” bots

(00:42:33) AI and copyright laws in the UK

(00:45:19) Google’s market power

(00:51:37) Advice for becoming a tech entrepreneur

(00:54:01) Amol’s reflections

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Episodes of Radical with Amol Rajan are released every Thursday and you can also watch them on BBC iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m002f1d0/radical-with-amol-rajan Amol Rajan is a presenter of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. He is also the host of University Challenge on BBC One. Before that, Amol was media editor at the BBC and editor at The Independent.

Radical with Amol Rajan is a Today Podcast. It was made by Lewis Vickers with Anna Budd. Digital production was by Gabriel Purcell-Davis. Technical production was by Ricardo McCarthy and Dafydd Evans. The editor is Sam Bonham. The executive producer is Owenna Griffiths.