Core Insights - The AI industry is facing a "data wall" as predicted by Epoch AI, which suggests that by 2028, all high-quality text data on the internet will be exhausted, leading to a struggle between AI companies seeking data and data owners [1] Group 1: Company Actions and Reactions - Cloudflare accused AI search unicorn Perplexity of violating website data scraping rules by ignoring the robots.txt file that prohibits AI crawlers from accessing certain content [2][4] - Perplexity allegedly disguised its crawlers as Chrome user agents to bypass website restrictions, prompting Cloudflare to remove Perplexity from its verified bot list [4][9] - Perplexity's spokesperson denied Cloudflare's claims, suggesting that Cloudflare's actions were self-serving and aimed at promoting its own services [4][8] Group 2: Industry Standards and Implications - The robots.txt file is a foundational element of internet standards, indicating which content is off-limits to crawlers, thus preserving bandwidth and server resources for website owners [11] - The disregard for established norms by companies like Perplexity could lead to a "tragedy of the commons," where excessive use of internet resources discourages content creators from sharing their work [13][14] - Cloudflare's introduction of a Pay Per Crawl platform indicates a potential monetization strategy in response to the challenges posed by AI crawlers, highlighting the ongoing conflict in the industry [9]

@eastdakota What are your thoughts?If users couldn't delegate their actions to AI agents, and all agent traffic was forbidden by robots.txt, then agents wouldn't be able to log in on behalf of users & perform actions.Perhaps robots.txt should get a new section for AI agents. ...