TORONTO — AI is inserting itself between almost every firm and its customers, threatening today’s business models, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince warned at The Logic Summit in Toronto on Monday.

A significant share of traffic on the internet passes through Cloudflare’s network, which helps websites deliver content and guard against cyber attacks. The San Francisco-headquartered firm made a US$90 million net loss on US$1.55 billion in revenue in the first nine months of the year. 

AI firms “need more and more and more data” to train models, Prince said. Over time, they will need to set themselves apart via access to exclusive content. Cloudflare now lets media companies block AI firms from crawling their websites unless they pay for the content.

“The most interesting question over the next five years is, ‘What is the future business model of the internet going to be?’” Prince said. 

Consumers are increasingly turning to ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews and other tools powered by large language models when they have questions. That makes it harder for companies putting information online to make an impression, and limits how much they benefit from the content they create. Even banks’ research departments are seeing declining sales, because investors are using AI-generated reports instead, according to Prince.

“Rosey the helpful robot is how people are going to consume information going forward,” he said, citing the automated household helper in the iconic 1960s children’s cartoon The Jetsons.

Prince called for media firms, small businesses and researchers to block AI developers from crawling their content. And he said policymakers should take on Google in particular. To generate search results, the tech giant has special rights to access millions of websites, he claimed. It’s now using those permissions to gather data for AI, and rivals like OpenAI must also crawl the web without compensating content creators in order to compete. 

Canada should force Google to separate its search and AI crawling activities, Prince said. Whichever country does that first, he said, will become “a place where everyone flows and puts their content.”

Google says it complies with the rules that website owners set for search engines via the robots.txt web standard. But in May, an executive told a U.S. court that AI Overviews and other AI search products can use content that owners block from being used to train other AI tools.

While AI developers have struck licensing deals with news publishers, Reddit and other content platforms, many are also being sued for copyright infringement.

Read more from The Logic Summit 2025 here.