Patreon is stepping up its fight against AI bots that scrape content for training purposes. The membership platform is now actively blocking these scraping tools in collaboration with Cloudflare's new AI Crawl Control technology. This move comes as publishers and content creators grapple with the impact of AI on their work.

"Consent shouldn't depend on whether a scraper chooses to behave," said Patreon in a blog post, highlighting the stricter measures they are implementing. These changes follow the introduction of new discovery tools like the Home Feed and Quips, which could expose more content to scraping.

In response to these developments, Cloudflare has introduced Pay Per Crawl, allowing websites to charge AI bots for accessing their content. Patreon is now using this technology to update its policies, blocking access to training bots that previously only had to be asked nicely not to scrape through robots.txt files.

"Creators deserve a meaningful say in how their work is used by AI companies, " noted Drew Rowny, Patreon's product chief. The platform hopes to provide creators with more control over the use of their content as AI continues to grow in power and popularity.