Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has warned that artificial intelligence (AI) is ruiningthe internet. During a recent interview, he said that the days of search engines being “the dominant interface of the web” are “long gone.” Speaking on the WIRED Big Interview Podcast, Prince expressed his concerns about a near-term dystopian AI scenario. He said: “Now, if you run a search, it gives you back an answer at the top of the page. It doesn’t give you a treasure map. Instead, it provides you with what they call an AI Overview, which has taken a whole bunch of content, smashed it together, summarised it in various ways, and synthesised it.” Prince also noted AI is not a search engine but an “answer engine,” and it does not generate traffic, which is essential for funding the work of internet content creators such as researchers, writers, and journalists.
What Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said about the future of internet
Prince has outlined three future possibilities for the internet as answer engines replace search engines. He dismisses the first one, where research may vanish and be entirely replaced by AI, since it still depends on human-created content. The second, which he sees as more likely, is a “Black Mirror possibility,” where most content creators end up employed by a few AI companies, similar to how powerful families like the Medicis once controlled art and knowledge output in the 1400s. In this scenario, major AI firms could dominate global information flows and shape them according to their own views, as seen when researchers found xAI’s Grok aligned its responses with Elon Musk’s opinions.“There will be a conservative one, and there will be a liberal one, and there’ll be a Chinese one, and there’ll be an Indian one,” Prince added.Prince warns that if people must subscribe to a few big AI companies for perspectives, information will become “siloed.” He says this goes against the internet’s original purpose of free knowledge sharing and risks undermining its role as the “great information equaliser, democratiser.”He even outlined a third possibility where AI companies will shift to a licensing model similar to Netflix, paying creators for content rather than scraping it for free. He argues that this would require content creators to create scarcity by blocking AI scrapers unless they are compensated. Some publishers have already filed lawsuits over the unauthorised use of their work, with Penske Media recently suing Google. Cloudflare has begun supporting this approach by letting customers block AI crawlers unless they pay, with clients like the Associated Press and Conde Nast already on board.“This is an existential threat to us. If the internet stops existing, what’s left for Cloudflare to do? So one of the things that is really important to us is a thriving and vibrant internet ecosystem,” Prince added.