Patreon, the membership platform for creators, is taking a harder stance against AI systems that scrape its content for training purposes. The company announced Thursday that it is collaborating with internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare to actively block AI bots designed to train models on creators’ work without permission.

These enhanced measures were necessary because AI scraping has grown more sophisticated since Patreon first implemented safeguards against AI crawlers in 2023, the company noted. While Patreon’s paywall has historically kept much of creators’ content out of crawlers’ reach, the platform’s recent introduction of discovery tools—such as a redesigned Home Feed and tweet-like Quips—could potentially expose more content to scraping.

This move comes as more online publishers and content creators grapple with how AI systems ingest their work to improve AI models. Cloudflare now offers tools that let website publishers restrict AI bots, including a marketplace called Pay Per Crawl, which allows sites to charge AI bots for scraping. Earlier this month, Cloudflare also updated its policies so that “mixed-use” crawlers—those that both index and train on a website’s content—are blocked by default on pages hosting ads.

Patreon says it is extending its existing partnership with Cloudflare to use the company’s AI Crawl Control technology, updating its AI policies and enforcement tools. The key difference is that instead of simply asking AI crawlers not to scrape content via robots.txt files—a standard method for instructing bots on site usage—Patreon is now actively blocking AI training bots.

“Consent shouldn’t depend on whether a scraper chooses to behave,” Patreon explained in a blog post, referencing the stricter measures. During testing, individual AI training crawlers’ weekly attempts to access Patreon dropped from “thousands of attempts to zero,” according to the post. This indicates that the AI scrapers were ignoring Patreon’s robots.txt file and scraping the site despite its requests.

However, the company said it will allow bots that index pages and organize information to send users back to Patreon. “As AI agents become increasingly powerful and popular, creators deserve a meaningful say in how their work is used by AI companies,” said Patreon’s product chief Drew Rowny in the announcement. “On most of the Internet, creators have to accept AI training on their work just to reach and grow an audience. Patreon has a different vision: creators should be able to grow their audience and control how their work is used.”