As the large language models powering generative AI tools slurp up ever more data across the web, Cloudflare cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince said at WIRED’s Big Interview event in San Francisco on Thursday that the internet infrastructure company has blocked more than 400 billion AI bot requests for its customers since July 1.

The action comes after the company announced a Content Independence Day in July—an initiative with prominent publishers and AI firms to block AI crawlers by default on content creators’ work unless the AI companies pay for access. Since July 2024, Cloudflare has offered customers tools to block AI bots from scraping their content. Cloudflare told WIRED that the number of AI bots blocked since July 1, 2025 is 416 billion.

“The business model of the internet has always been to generate content that drives traffic [to a website] and then sell either things, subscriptions, or ads,” Prince told WIRED’s executive editor, Brian Barrett. “What I think people don’t realize, though, is that AI is a platform shift. The business model of the internet is about to change dramatically. I don’t know what it’s going to change to, but it’s what I’m spending almost every waking hour thinking about.”

As a company, Cloudflare’s offerings are geared toward making it faster and safer to access content online. But as the AI industry has exploded and AI giants have emerged, Prince says he’s become increasingly focused on how Cloudflare can leverage its position to discourage consolidation and safeguard the internet as a place where businesses and creators of every size can survive—or, ideally, thrive.

“We need to be able to make sure that businesses large and small flourish on a fair playing ground,” Prince said. “That is the future that we’re trying to play for. That’s the best thing for our business, because that’s more people to be customers of ours. That’s more internet for us to be able to protect.”

Prince specifically highlighted concerns about Google’s policies around its search and AI crawlers. As a major AI player jostling for dominance, Google combined its search and AI crawlers into one, so blocking its AI scraper also blocks a site’s ability to be indexed in Google search. The move has put content creators in a bind, because they don’t want AI models to train on their creations, but they typically need their place in Google search to help audiences find their material.

“You can’t opt out of one without opting out of both, which is a real challenge—it’s crazy,” Prince said. “It shouldn’t be that you can use your monopoly position of yesterday in order to leverage and have a monopoly position in the market of tomorrow.”