“The new endpoint allows site operators to charge AI crawlers per request, with payment settled on-chain.”
Cloudflare watched the entire AI industry strip-mine the open web for training data and decided to put a tollbooth on the road. The protocol is interesting. The politics are simple. Cloudflare sits in front of a fifth of the web, so whatever rate they charge becomes the de facto market price. OpenAI and Anthropic will pay it because they have to, and small publishers will get a cut they would never have negotiated themselves.