After Cloudflare started testing new features that would allow websites to block AI crawlers or require payment for scraping, the tech company immediately faced questions over the logistics of the plan.

In particular, website owners and SEO experts wanted to know how Cloudflare planned to block Google's bot from scraping sites to fuel AI overviews without risking blocking the same bot from crawling for valuable search engine placements.

Last week, a travel blogger raised questions about the blocking and so-called pay-per-crawl features and pushed Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince to respond on X (formerly Twitter):

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Now that Meta has largely beaten an AI training copyright lawsuit raised by 13 book authors—including comedian Sarah Silverman and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz—the only matter left to settle in that case is whether Meta violated copyright laws by torrenting books used to train Llama models.

In an order that partly grants Meta's motion for summary judgment, judge Vince Chhabria confirmed that Meta and the authors would meet on July 11 to "discuss how to proceed on the plaintiffs’ separate claim that Meta unlawfully distributed their protected works during the torrenting process."

Chhabria's order suggested that authors may struggle to win this part of the fight, too, due to a lack of evidence, as there has not yet been much discovery on this issue that was raised so late in the case. But he also warned that Meta was wrong to argue its torrenting was completely "irrelevant" to whether its copying of books was fair use.

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After The New York Times sued OpenAI in December 2023—alleging that ChatGPT outputs violate copyrights by regurgitating news articles—the ChatGPT maker tried and failed to argue that the claims were time-barred.

According to OpenAI, the NYT should have known that ChatGPT was being trained on its articles and raised its lawsuit in 2020, partly because of the newspaper's own reporting. To support this, OpenAI pointed to a single November 2020 article, where the NYT reported that OpenAI was analyzing a trillion words on the Internet. But on Friday, US district judge Sidney Stein disagreed, denying OpenAI's motion to dismiss the NYT's copyright claims partly based on one NYT journalist's reporting.

In his opinion, Stein confirmed that it's OpenAI's burden to prove that the NYT knew that ChatGPT would potentially violate its copyrights two years prior to its release in November 2022. And so far, OpenAI has not met that burden.

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