Last month, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft’s artificial intelligence division, stated during a panel interview that in his opinion, artificial intelligence services that receive training from the information found on almost all websites are considered “fair use.” He added, “Anyone can copy it, create with it anew, duplicate with. It was ‘free software’ and that was the understanding.”

Those statements sparked a lot of debate from a number of people online, who felt that Soliman’s opinion showed that companies like Microsoft, OpenAi, Google, and others with AI systems don’t care about owning content from the sites trained by Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini, and others.

This week, Cloudflare, one of the largest web hosts, announced that it will make it easier for its customers to block their content from AI bots. In a blog post, It has determined that all of its hosting customers, including its free users, can go into their Cloudflare website dashboard, then click on the security option, and finally on the bots section.

They should see a new section called AI Scrapers and Crawlers with a toggle, clicking this toggle will block these AI robots from taking content from the site. Cloudflare says it will update this feature in the future “as we see new fingerprints of malicious bots that we identify widely scraping the web for model training.” It added:

We fear that some AI companies intent on circumventing rules to access content will constantly adapt to evade bot detection. We will continue to track and add more bot blocks to our AI scrapers and crawlers and develop our machine learning models to help keep the web a place where content creators can thrive and maintain full control over the models whose content is used to train or run inferences on.

The blog post also offered information on the top AI bots, in terms of requests from websites hosted on Cloudflare. The largest is Bytespider, which is used by ByteDance of China, the parent company of TikTok, for use in its Chinese AI services such as Doubao. Other top AI scraper bots include Amazonbot, which is reportedly used to get data for Amazon’s Alexa service.

Bytespider is also the top AI bot in terms of percentage share of Cloudflare sites with 40.40 percent. GPTBot, from OpenAI, is a close second with 35.46 percent,