THE 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

MATTHEW PRINCE HAD TO BE CONVERTED to the belief that AI is eating the web.

- 

Matthew Prince

CEO CLOUDFLARE

It was 18 months ago that he started getting calls from media executives, who complained to him about AI companies copying articles to train their models without compensation.

Prince's first reaction, he says, was to roll his eyes. "Media companies are always complaining about whatever the new technology is," he tells TIME.

But then Prince, the CEO of the internet security company Cloudflare, ran the numbers. His company has 10 years of web-traffic data, a by-product of its main service: protecting sites from being knocked offline by surges in traffic or targeted attacks. What he found shocked him. With the arrival of "AI overviews" to Google's search results, the data showed, news sites have begun finding it 10 times as hard to get traffic as they did a decade ago, he claims. The same metric for chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude is even worse, he says.

"The problem is that as the web shifts from a search-driven interface to an AI-driven interface, fewer and fewer people are going to consume the original content," says Prince, who with his wife owns a local newspaper in his hometown of Park City, Utah. "And that means that the incentives for creating content go away."