Patreonthe membership platform for creators, fights AI that hacks their content for educational purposes. On Thursday, the company shared that it is working with internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare to directly block access to AI bots designed to train their AI models on the work of unlicensed creators.
The enhanced measures were necessary because AI scraping has become more sophisticated since it first took steps to prevent AI detectors in 2023, the company says. Additionally, Patreon’s paywall has long locked much of creator content away from crawlers. But more recently, the company has introduced new discovery tools, including a redesigned Home Feed and this one Quips that look like tweetswhich could expose more content to crawlers.
The changes come as more online publishers and content creators understand how AI is absorbing their work to make AI models smarter. To combat this, Cloudflare now offers tools that allow website publishers to limit AI bots, including a marketplace that allows websites to charge AI bots for scraping, called Pay Per Crawl. Earlier this month, it changed its policies so that “mixed-use” crawlers, meaning those that index and train on a site’s content, are blocked by default on any pages that host ads.
Patreon says it is expanding its existing partnership with Cloudflare to use the company’s AI Crawl Control technology to inform its AI policies and enforcement tools. The difference here is that instead of simply asking AI crawlers not to clip content using robots.txt files—a standard way to give bots instructions on how to use its site—Patreon now actively blocks AI training bots.
“Consent should not depend on whether a scratcher chooses to behave,” a Patreon blog post he explains, referring to the strictest measures.
In testing the features, weekly attempts by individual AI training trackers to access Patreon went from “thousands of attempts to zero,” the post noted. This shows that the AI scrapers ignored Patreon’s robots.txt file and were breaking the site anyway, despite his requests.
However, the company said it will allow bots that index pages and organize information that can be used to send users back to Patreon.
“As AI agents become increasingly powerful and popular, creators deserve a meaningful say in how their work is used by AI companies,” Patreon chief product officer Drew Rowny noted in the announcement. “Across most of the web, creators have to accept AI training in their work just to reach and grow audiences. Patreon has a different vision: creators should be able to grow their audience and control how their work is used.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
