Patreon has started blocking known AI training crawlers from every post on its platform, working with Cloudflare at the network level. CEO Jack Conte announced it on Instagram with characteristically blunt wording. He said it was already live on all posts and ended with a warning to crawlers to stay away.
Search crawlers are still allowed, so creators stay discoverable. Product head Drew Rowny said creators should not have to accept AI training as the price of reaching an audience. The block builds on Cloudflare's earlier move to stop agentic bots on new domains by default.
Conte has argued for months that creators are owed consent, credit and payment when their work trains AI models, and that right now they get none of the three. He has said he is both amazed by the technology and furious that creators are not paid for the value their work gave it.
PetaPixel notes that the change matters to photographers, who use Patreon to sell tutorials and run paid communities.
Sources · 1