Patreon stops asking AI bots not to scrape and starts blocking them

3:38 AM · July 17, 2026

Patreon is strengthening its defenses against AI scraping by partnering with Cloudflare to actively block bots that train AI models on creators' content without permission, according to TechCrunch. The move marks a shift away from Patreon's previous approach, which relied mainly on a robots.txt file, a voluntary standard that simply asks automated crawlers not to scrape a site's content, a request that well behaved bots follow but that offers no actual technical barrier against ones that ignore it. By working directly with Cloudflare's bot blocking infrastructure, Patreon can now identify and actively deny access to scrapers that attempt to harvest creator content for AI training data, rather than merely posting a polite request that noncompliant crawlers can freely ignore. The change reflects a broader shift among platforms that host creator made content, from writers to video makers to artists, toward active technical enforcement against AI training scraping rather than relying on norms or legal threats after the fact. For a platform whose entire business model depends on creators trusting that their paywalled or exclusive content will not simply end up training a competing AI model for free, the move is as much about maintaining creator confidence in the platform as it is about the underlying scraping technology itself.