Check Out Highlights From WIRED's Big Interview Event On December 4, WIRED sat down with some of the biggest names in tech, culture, business, and science for a day full of in-depth interviews. In 2024, we brought those talks to a stage in San Francisco for the very first time. This year, we did it again, bringing together AMD CEO Lisa Su, director Jon M. Chu, Anthropic cofounder Daniela Amodei, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, and many more. The Big Interview, a one-day, in-person event held at The Midway in San Francisco on December 4, featured a series of in-depth, illuminating Q&As with some of the biggest names in innovation today, each led by a WIRED journalist. We also hosted our take on a modern-day science fair, complete with hands-on demos and other fun experiences.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince claims the internet infrastructure company's efforts to block AI crawlers are already seeing big results. 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.

While puzzling captchas--from dogs in hats to sliding jockstraps--still exist, most bot-deterring challenges have vanished into the background. As I browse the web in 2025, I rarely encounter captchas anymore. There's no slanted text to discern. No image grid of stoplights to identify. And on the rare occasion that I am asked to complete some bot-deterring task, the experience almost always feels surreal.

The Cloudflare CEO joined to talk about standing up to content scraping, the internet's potential futures, and his company's relationship to Trump. Matthew Prince may not be a household name, but the world most certainly knows his work. Prince is the cofounder and CEO of Cloudflare . Launched in 2010, the internet infrastructure company has found itself increasingly in the position of serving as the web's bodyguard. It filters out bad traffic, keeps sites safe, and stops them from crashing when too many people visit. Its tools defend against DDoS attacks. In 2017, Cloudflare made headlines when it dropped white supremacist site The Daily Stormer . Cloudflare's severing of ties with The Daily Stormer marked a momentous shift, one that came after years of claiming a neutral stance. Prince continues to evolve the way Cloudflare works. In July, the company rolled out a new tool tasked with blocking unauthorized AI scraping. It effectively creates a pay-per-crawl model requiring AI platforms to shell out money if they want access to a site's content. On this episode of, I talked to Prince about publishing, the old internet, and how his ideal version of the future web means that OpenAI just might become the Netflix of content. KATIE DRUMMOND: Good to have you here, Matthew. You should have been warned ahead of time, but you probably weren't.

Gone are the days when the web was dominated by humans posting social media updates or exchanging memes. Earlier this year, for the first time since the data has been tracked, web-browsing bots, rather than humans, accounted for the bulk of web traffic. Well over half of that bot traffic is from malicious bots, hoovering up personal data left unprotected online, for instance. But an increasing proportion comes from bots sent out by artificial intelligence companies to gather data for their models or respond to user prompts. Indeed, ChatGPT-User, a bot powering OpenAI's ChatGPT, is now responsible for 6 per cent of all web traffic, while ClaudeBot, an automated system developed by AI company Anthropic, accounts for 13 per cent.

For years, so-called "nudify" apps and websites have mushroomed online, allowing people to create nonconsensual and abusive images of women and girls, including child sexual abuse material. Despite some lawmakers and tech companies taking steps to limit the harmful services, every month, millions of people are still accessing the websites, and the sites' creators may be making millions of dollars each year, new research suggests. An analysis of 85 nudify and "undress" websites--which allow people to upload photos and use AI to generate "nude" pictures of the subjects with just a few clicks--has found that most of the sites rely on tech services from Google, Amazon, and Cloudflare to operate and stay online. The findings, revealed by Indicator, a publication investigating digital deception, say that the websites had a combined average of 18.5 million visitors for each of the past six months and collectively may be making up to 36 million per year. Alexios Mantzarlis, a cofounder of Indicator and an online safety researcher, says the murky nudifier ecosystem has become a "lucrative business" that "Silicon Valley's laissez-faire approach to generative AI" has allowed to persist.

The UK's world-leading creative industries have been given a fresh boost in their fight to stop Big Tech companies'stealing' their work. US-based computer services and cyber security firm Cloudflare has introduced a tool which blocks Silicon Valley giants from mining creative works for free. Titans of entertainment, including Sir Elton John, Lord Lloyd-Webber and Dua Lipa, have been locked in a battle with ministers as artists demand better protection from the bots. The Government last month defeated an amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill by Baroness Kidron, director of Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason, after weeks of ping-pong between the Commons and the crossbench peer's growing number of supporters in the Lords. But Cloudflare's latest innovation will give publishers and website owners greater control over their intellectual property, allowing them to choose whether they want AI companies to access their content.

According to Cloudflare there has been an explosion of AI bot activity. "AI Crawlers generate more than 50 billion requests to the Cloudflare network every day", the company wrote in March. And there is growing concern that some AI crawlers are disregarding existing protocols for excluding bots. In an effort to counter the worst offenders Cloudflare previously developed a system where the worst miscreants would be sent to a "Labyrinth" of web pages filled with AI generated junk. The new system attempts to use technology to protect the content of websites and to give sites the option to charge AI firms a fee to access it.

A growing number of people are using AI chatbots as "trip sitters"--a phrase that traditionally refers to a sober person tasked with monitoring someone who's under the influence of a psychedelic--and sharing their experiences online. It's a potent blend of two cultural trends: using AI for therapy and using psychedelics to alleviate mental-health problems. But this is a potentially dangerous psychological cocktail, according to experts. While it's far cheaper than in-person psychedelic therapy, it can go badly awry. Cloudflare will now, by default, block AI bots from crawling its clients' websites The news: The internet infrastructure company Cloudflare has announced that it will start blocking AI bots from visiting websites it hosts by default.

However, such systems don't provide the same opportunities for monetization and credit as search engines historically have. AI models draw from a great deal of data on the web to generate their outputs, but these data sources are often not credited, limiting the creators' ability to make money from their work. Search engines that feature AI-generated answers may include links to original sources, but they may also reduce people's interest in clicking through to other sites and could even usher in a "zero-click" future. "Traditionally, the unspoken agreement was that a search engine could index your content, then they would show the relevant links to a particular query and send you traffic back to your website," Will Allen, Cloudflare's head of AI privacy, control, and media products, wrote in an email to MIT Technology Review. Generally, creators and publishers want to decide how their content is used, how it's associated with them, and how they are paid for it.