MANILA, Philippines — Generative AI has taken the web by storm. As Filipino customers more and more depend on AI instruments for fast solutions, the great previous apply of participating instantly with authentic content material is fading quick.
Cloudflare warns that whereas these instruments could also be handy, they take content material with out permission and a cent to pay — hurting creators within the course of.
Blogs, information media and business specialists alike danger having their work scraped, reused and republished with out correct attribution. Even worse, AI instruments can twist content material out of context, turning it right into a potential supply of misinformation.
Potential readers are additionally being misplaced to AI, as customers might not really feel the necessity to go to the unique websites the place the very solutions got here from.
Cloudflare’s ASEAN Vice President Kenneth Lai stated this shouldn’t be the case.
“AI instruments come and scrape the content material and simply return and use the content material for their very own profit. So the content material creator will get completely nothing,” he informed Philstar.com in an unique interview.
“Cloudflare enterprise says sufficient is sufficient,” he stated.
How a lot does AI crawl
Lai harassed that constructing a safer, extra dependable web additionally relies on creators having the ability to take management of their work and forestall AI from utilizing it with out permission or credit score.
“AI firms take the content material and take it out of context to serve their function. So subsequently, we have to be sensible about it,” he stated.
What the info reveals. Within the first eight months of 2025, Cloudflare Radar discovered that 21% of AI crawlers detected on information websites had been used for looking out data, whereas 65% had been for coaching.
Among the many 14 industries the agency tracked, information and publications had been essentially the most closely crawled by AI bots for search queries — displaying that individuals flip to AI instruments and chatbots to lookup present occasions.
However do folks click on on the referred websites? Cloudflare found that among the high AI chatbots not often drive visitors again to the web sites the place the knowledge initially got here from.
Throughout the identical interval, Cloudflare Radar discovered that OpenAI’s ChatGPT bots referred customers again to a web site solely as soon as for roughly each 200 crawls. Anthropic’s Claude carried out even worse, with only one referral for each 5,400 crawls.
Why this issues. For corporations and people incomes from views and clicks, this implies AI bots that freely crawl and scrape data can probably siphon off readers and drive down income.
Cloudflare, a number one cloud and cybersecurity firm, has developed a mechanism to assist organizations defend their content material from AI crawlers via a permission-based mannequin.
“We’re constructing functionality to assist firms to dam these makes an attempt in order that we return the management again to the content material creators,” Lai stated.
“It is to permit the content material creator to cost these AI firms. So subsequently, you’ll be able to monetize that once more,” he added.
Block or pay AI crawlers
In July, the agency announced it might be the primary web infrastructure supplier to let web site house owners block AI bots from crawling their content material and select which bots to permit.
The transfer comes as some AI firms nonetheless fail to let IP addresses confirm their bots’ id, disclose the aim of their crawls, or respect web site guidelines on what bots can and can’t do.
The function, first launched in September 2024, has since gained help from a number of media and publishing firms.
Other than giving corporations the ability to determine which AI bots can crawl their websites, Cloudflare can be engaged on a pay-per-crawl model.
Because the title suggests, web site house owners might select to monetize crawler entry by charging AI corporations each time their bots wish to scrape content material.
The choice remains to be being examined and isn’t but out there to the general public.
With synthetic intelligence solely advancing, Lai warned it might be troubling if creators misplaced the motivation to provide work, particularly as each firms and impartial creators depend on on-line content material for revenue.
“As a result of are you able to think about if content material creators do not get rewarded and acknowledge what they do? They cease creating content material. If we arrive on the day, when the web stops having content material, that is the place the web loses effectiveness,” he added.
Safety danger on the rise with AI
On high of that danger, Lai stated cyberattacks have turn into extra “complicated and complex” and are prone to hold growing, particularly with the rise of AI.
He defined that attackers are actually utilizing bots and linked gadgets to use vulnerabilities in internet-linked programs, generally often called IoT (Web of Issues) gadgets.
“It may very well be state-sponsored, it may very well be something. It may very well be focused at particular person or focused at firms. And we see that these assaults are getting extra subtle,” he stated.
A Cloudflare examine reveals that knowledge breaches and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults have been on a rising development lately. In reality, the Philippines experiences extra knowledge breaches than the Asia-Pacific common, Lai stated.
In 2024, 46% of Philippine corporations reported knowledge breaches, which was above the 40% Asia-Pacific common. Most raised concern over extra subtle AI-driven assaults, saying that over a tenth of their IT budgets are spent on cybersecurity.
The nation additionally logged almost 21 million DDoS assaults in 2024, the place servers are flooded with web visitors till they decelerate and crash.
“And this quantity, I can assure, goes to continue to grow. … As a result of the Philippines, like lots of different ASEAN international locations, is topic to lots of geopolitical challenges and all that,” Lai stated.
AI instruments below watch
Cloudflare’s cloud entry safety dealer (CASB), which gives numerous cybersecurity providers, now provides corporations a strategy to check the security risks of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s Gemini.
Merely put, organizations utilizing Cloudflare One can scan built-in AI platforms and obtain alerts for delicate knowledge shared in chats or prompts, compliance dangers and potential misconfigurations.
Directors may also see what knowledge staff share on AI platforms and chats they’ve.
With assaults anticipated to develop, Lai stated organizations should strengthen their programs and equip their folks to struggle again.
“So the notice of those assaults have to be elevated, the expertise pool coming from the businesses and from the federal government have to look into that and scale up,” he added.
To do that, Lai harassed, the federal government should companion with tech organizations and put money into initiatives that educate Filipinos the right way to defend their knowledge and content material on-line.
“I believe it is crucial for presidency companies to work intently with the tech organisations to fight this,” he stated. “We, at Cloudflare, are more than pleased to take a position again to have training and to inform folks the right way to keep away from these sorts of scammers.”
