The bot blockade

Cloudflare might kickstart a new era where bots have to pay to play. Plus: AI takes on newsroom bias, fake experts at Elle, and more

Just when you thought the AI news cycle might slow down for the summer, on July 1 Cloudflare dropped this nugget: it would be switching to an opt-in policy for AI scraping, meaning customers using its infrastructure would start blocking bots by default. That has big implications, which I get into below, but first a quick note that this week's podcast wi…