Patreon is expanding its protections against unauthorized AI scraping, deploying Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control technology to strengthen enforcement across the platform as more creator work is made available through free discovery features.

The company has maintained measures to deter AI training on creator work without permission since 2023, but said increasingly sophisticated scraping techniques required a stronger response. The update adds network-level blocking of known AI training crawlers to Patreon’s existing protections. During early testing, individual AI training crawlers’ weekly attempts to access Patreon dropped from thousands to zero, according to the company.

“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,” said Drew Rowny, SVP of Product at Patreon, in a blog post. “That’s why we’re building on our existing work with Cloudflare to block known AI training crawlers at the network level across Patreon, while still allowing the crawlers that help creators get discovered and grow their businesses through search.”

Lara Cohen, Cloudflare’s VP of Strategic Partnerships, said the deployment addresses “one of the biggest challenges facing modern creators: the tension between visibility and control.”

The rollout also aligns with Patreon’s product roadmap. The company rolled out its largest product update in company history in April, introducing Quips, a short-form post format, alongside a redesigned Home feed, Collaboration posts, and a Memberships-only feed, all designed to convert free followers into paying members and reduce creator reliance on outside social platforms. Free memberships on Patreon have nearly doubled since early last year, reaching more than 165 million, while creators earn upward of $2 billion annually from roughly 80 million fans. As more creator work moves in front of the paywall through those discovery features, Patreon said, the scraping protections are intended to travel with it.

The move also extends positions Patreon co-founder and CEO Jack Conte laid out in March, when he called for AI companies to adopt a framework of consent, credit, and compensation for creator work used in model training. Conte said at the time that Patreon does not use creator work to train generative AI models, and cited existing licensing deals between AI companies and major publishers to argue against a blanket fair-use defense for scraping independent creators’ content.

Patreon frames the rollout around a concept it calls the 3C Rule (Consent, Credit, Compensation), developed by lawyer Monica Boța-Moisin, and the company said this update addresses the consent component specifically. It said it will continue exploring additional protections as AI scraping practices evolve.

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