Patreon stops asking AI bots not to scrape — and starts blocking them

Patreon has shifted from passive requests to active enforcement against AI scraping by implementing Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control technology, reducing scraper access attempts from thousands weekly to zero. This reflects a broader industry trend where content platforms are moving beyond voluntary compliance mechanisms (robots.txt) to technical blocking as AI models become increasingly aggressive at ingesting training data without permission. For IT organizations, this signals the need to evaluate data governance policies, content protection strategies, and compliance with emerging standards around AI training data usage across their platforms and applications.