The Indicator from Planet Money · Tuesday, July 14, 2026
In response to AI companies using their content without permission, publishers are exploring various countermeasures. Mark Howard mentioned that some, like The New York Times, are pursuing legal action, while others are looking into technologies like bot paywalls developed by companies such as CloudFlare. These tools could potentially require AI bots to pay for crawling publisher websites.
“For example, publishers like the New York Times are suing AI companies for allegedly training their models on their articles without permission.”
“There's also companies like CloudFlare developing tools that would allow publishers to put out, basically, a bot paywalls so that if a bot wants to crawl their site, it will have to pay.”