On Cloudflare’s very surprising ideas about AI and the future of web publishing: “That’s my counterprosal: AI should pay for the stuff it already uses, and people should keep putting up paywalls.” (Paul Ford, Aboard)

AI bots endlessly scrape publisher sites, causing costly downtime and meager traffic. (Charlotte Tobitt, PressGazette)

The publishers’ guide to being gaslit by tech platforms (the AI edition) (Seb Joseph, Sara Guaglione, DigiDay)

AI is killing the web. Can anything save it? asks The Economist, referring to business models that rely on traffic and advertising. Tollbit, a paywall for bots, reports its highest per-crawl rates at a local newspaper. Unique content appears to be part of the solution.

Google got The Economist and The Atlantic to provide content for NotebookLM (Sarah Perez, TechCrunch)

Alex Reisner reports on Silicon Valley’s “assault” on the media: “The world is changing fast, perhaps irrevocably. The institutions that comprise our country’s free press are fighting for their survival.” (The Atlantic)

AI chatbots try to get to articles behind paywalls, and they do it the same way humans would: they search the web and social media for copies and excerpts, then piece it together. The difference is they can do it way faster, which raises the question of whether these bots should be allowed to do this at all. (Henk van Ess, Digital Digging)

AI-powered news app Particle expands into Long Reads, teaming up with The Atlantic.

You shall not pass… unless you pay: Cloudflare has launched a private beta enabling customers to allow, charge, or block bot-access to their content. For it to work, bot operators such as OpenAI or Google would have to use a new protocol named Web Bot Auth and be willing to pay.

Initial US rulings, as expected, give AI training the green light. Some lawsuits against AI companies have been dismissed, with courts distinguishing between AI training (legal) and traditional piracy (still illegal). (Florent Daudens, HuggingFace)

Another fun one: Cloudflare CEO warns of AI-driven “existential threat” to publishers as search traffic dwindles amid bot-fueled content skimming. (Christine Wang, Axios)

Yes to deals, payments, and control: Meredith Levien, CEO of The New York Times, talks about the Amazon-deal. She likes to think of Times journalism as “IP”, not “data”. (Adweek, soon on the Mixed Signals podcast from Semafor)

The rise of retrieval bots raises questions about data ownership, monetization, and the future of the open web. (Nitasha Tiku, Washington Post)

The OpenAI-suing New York Times is entering into a multi-year partnership with Amazon, with content appearing on Alexa and going into AI training. (Jaspreet Singh, Reuters)

Judicial panel overrides author preferences, bundles diverse copyright claims against AI companies into single NY proceeding. (Ella Creamer, The Guardian)