Paying for content for AI
The point is a good one:
If you want to get chips from NVIDIA, Jensen [the CEO] makes you pay for them [...] If you want to get the best researchers, they get salaries. We're not going to say "oh, AI is so important that we're going to bring back slavery". That doesn't make any sense. So I don't understand why if the content [...] is the fuel running these things, why is it they have to pay for the chips, they have to pay for the researchers, but they don't have to pay for the content? That doesn't make any sense to me.
That quote from Matthew Prince in conversation with Amol Rajan (23 October 2025).
The author of that quote is the CEO of Cloudflare, who is by default now blocking AI training crawlers from accessing web pages with commercial content. They have an early access pay-per-crawl billing mechanism to go along with that (of which they will surely take a cut). It uses the HTTP 402 status code, which sounds something like the micropayments ideas, but with your robot running up the bill for the content it gathers.
I suspect this is interesting for a huge chunk of the internet, who likely can't spend a lot of time negotiating with Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
It was sounding like an interesting angle, until I saw they're saying it'll be crypto-based. I'd prefer some integers in a database, but that's me.