Business | World wide worries

AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?

The rise of ChatGPT and its rivals is undermining the economic bargain of the internet

An illustration of a tomb of 'The World Wide Web, 1989-2025'.
Illustration: Nick Little
|9 min read

Around the beginning of last year, Matthew Prince started receiving worried calls from the chief executives of large media companies. They told Mr Prince, whose firm, Cloudflare, provides security infrastructure to about a quarter of the web, that their businesses faced a grave new online threat. “I said, ‘What, is it the North Koreans?’,” he recalls. “And they said, ‘No. It’s AI’.”

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