Cloudflare Drops the Hammer on AI Crawlers

Front-End Fire

The big tech company conferences continued this summer with Vercel hosting Vercel Ship 2025. As you’d expect there was lots of talk about AI and Vercel’s AI Cloud: tools, infrastructure, and platform enhancements to build AI agents and help AI agents use Vercel.

On July 1, hosting platform Cloudflare declared Content Independence Day, and changed its settings to block AI crawlers by default unless they pay creators for their content. While we absolutely support this move, Cloudflare’s future vision of a marketplace where content creators and AI companies come together and compensation is based on how much content “furthers knowledge” seems idealistic, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Serverless Postgres database company Neon has a new product called Neon Launchpad that can create an instant Neon database with zero configuration or account creation. Users get an automatically generated connection string, 72 hours to claim a new database, and even automatic database seeding with SQL scripts for schema and data initialization.

Timestamps:

• 2:13 - Vercel Ship event updates
• 7:49 - Cloudfare declares content independence day
• 16:12 - Neon Launchpad
• 20:03 - Figma IPO
• 22:24 - Deno v. Oracle trademark update
• 25:10 - Antropic lets Claude run a vending machine
• 32:21 - What’s making us happy

Links:

• News:
  • Paige - Cloudflare declares July 1 Content Independence Day
  • Jack - Neon Launchpad instant DBs
  • TJ - Vercel Ship 2025
• Lightning:
  • Figma has filed for an IPO to trade on the stock exchange as “FIG”
  • Claude ran a vending machine, and the first attempt at “vibe management” wasn’t great
  • Deno v. Oracle trademark update
• What Makes Us Happy this Week:
  • Paige - Squid Game season 3
  • Jack - F1: The Movie
  • TJ - Bobby Banilla Day

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