Cloudflare on Wednesday announced that beginning Sept. 15, 2026, its default settings will block mixed-use web crawlers, those that combine traditional search with AI agentAI agentAn AI system that carries out multi-step tasks on its own, such as browsing, writing code or making purchases, rather than answering a single prompt. Agents raise new questions about liability, security and oversight because they act rather than just advise. use and training, from any pages that host ads, TechCrunch reported. The change applies to new Cloudflare customers, all new sites set up by existing customers, and all existing free customers, unless site owners opt out. Cloudflare Chief Executive Matthew Prince said the shift comes as bot traffic surpassed human traffic on the internet earlier than expected, and that the goal is to encourage crawlers to separate search from agent use and training so publishers can sustain their businesses. The announcement calls out Google by inferenceInferenceRunning a trained AI model to answer a query, as distinct from training it. Inference is where most ongoing compute and energy demand now sits, and it is what chip export rules increasingly target alongside training. as having access to about twice as much information as other AI companies through the combination of its search and AI crawlers. Google has previously noted that its Google Extended bot lets site owners opt out of training and Gemini uses without affecting Search inclusion.
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Nvidia said Wednesday it will grant AI startups computeComputeThe processing power used to train and run AI models, usually measured in chips, GPU-hours or FLOPs. credits in exchange for a share of their future sales, connecting AI data center operators with cloud providers under its DSX AI factories branding, Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress wrote in a company blog post. The arrangement gives Nvidia both standard product revenue and a recurring usage-linked share of cloud earnings, per Bloomberg. Cloud companies including Sharon AI and Firmus Technologies are among the first working with Nvidia under the model, which the company said will give model builders, inferenceInferenceRunning a trained AI model to answer a query, as distinct from training it. Inference is where most ongoing compute and energy demand now sits, and it is what chip export rules increasingly target alongside training. providers and agent platforms faster access to full-stack accelerated computing without waiting through site selection, power procurement, construction and hardware bring-up. Nvidia's market capitalization is the largest of any listed U.S. company.
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The biggest AI companies are increasingly investing in research into whether their chatbots have consciousness or emotions, the Washington Post reported, moving a once-fringe question into the Silicon Valley mainstream. Over the past year, Anthropic, Google and Meta have hired computer scientists, neuroscientists and philosophers to study "model welfare" and the possibility that AI systems have subjective experiences, with Anthropic forming an AI psychiatry team and naming a head of model welfare. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah said in May, at the release of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI, that the company finds states that "functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease," while OpenAI said it instead focuses on "perceived consciousness," or how conscious a model appears to users, which it treats as a design outcome. Neuroscientists and some AI researchers remain skeptical, with Hugging Face chief ethics scientist Margaret Mitchell arguing the debate is driven by companies that stand to gain from being seen as creating more than code.
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