😺 Cloudflare says AI's free lunch is over 💀

Welcome, humans.

Don’t let anyone tell you there’s not a productive use for OpenAI’s ImageGen. Exhibit A: this person, who used it to finally convince someone that they changed their number.

Now, can this power be used for nefarious purposes? Absolutely. DM bots could totally start using this tech to convince you it’s your mom needing you to send her money.

As A16z partner Justine Moore pointed out, AI now just lets anyone “be a hot girl online now.” So if they start popping up in your DMs out of nowhere, beware!

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

• Cloudflare launched a system to make AI bots pay for content.
• Amazon deployed over 1M robots in its factories.
• Grammarly acquired email startup Superhuman.
• The maker of AI editor Cursor poached two Claude Code leads.

Advertise in The Neuron here.

Cloudflare wants to make AI pay for your content.

For years, content creators have faced a tough choice: either let AI companies scrape everything you’ve ever written for free to train their models, or block them entirely and miss out on potential traffic. But what if there was a third option?

Cloudflare is building an internet-wide tollbooth for AI. In a new private beta, the company is dusting off a forgotten piece of web infrastructure—the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code—to launch a system called pay per crawl.

The idea is simple: give publishers a way to charge AI crawlers for access to their content, with Cloudflare handling the payments.

Here’s how it gives creators control:

• Publishers can set a flat, per-request price for their entire website.
• For every known AI crawler, you get three choices: Allow them for free, Block them completely, or Charge them your set price.
• AI companies can either agree to pay proactively by setting a budget per request or reactively after being told the price.
• If they don’t pay, they don’t get the content.

This move comes as AI crawler traffic is exploding. From 2024 to 2025, traffic from GPTBot (OpenAI’s crawler) grew a staggering 305%. This system creates a standardized way for creators of all sizes, not just massive media companies, to get compensated.

The bigger picture is a future run by AI agents. Cloudflare isn’t just thinking about today’s crawlers. They envision a world where AI agents are the primary way we interact with the internet. Imagine telling your AI assistant to research a legal brief or find the latest cancer studies, and then giving it a budget to programmatically find and pay for the most valuable, up-to-date information online.

This system is the technical foundation for that agentic future. It transforms content from a free-for-all buffet into a valuable, transactable asset. Once this thing rolls out en masse, the AI content free for all might finally be coming to an end.

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Level up your AI skills in 40 minutes…

It’s time to level up your AI use in 2025, and we’ve got three videos to help you do it!

1. Jeff Su shares how (and when) to use ChatGPT’s web search, Deep Research, and Canvas tools work.
2. Tina Huang top tools for how to use AI in your daily life, including her top chatbot picks, her top agent tools, and her top vibe-coding tools, and how she uses them across both work productivity and daily life stuff.
3. Grace Leung’s tutorial shares her simple 3-step framework for building a scalable AI work team, including how to map your workflow, design specialized AI assistants, put together an AI research team, and add a manager agent to delegate tasks between your research and visual agents.

You can watch all three videos in only ~40 minutes. Come on, you got 40 minutes to spare… think of all the time watching these will save you once you learn all their secrets!

Want more like this? Check out all of our Prompt Tips of the Day from June here.

P.S: Completely new to AI? Start here!

Treats To Try.

*Asterisk = from our partners. Advertise in The Neuron here.

1. *Murf AI turns your text into human-like speech in 200+ voices, so you can narrate presentations or create audiobooks without recording anything yourself.
2. Tandem Health automates clinical documentation for European doctors using AI voice transcription (raised $50M).
3. LogicFlo brings agentic AI to pharmaceutical and medtech teams for workflow automation (raised $2.7M).
4. Campfire handles general ledger, revenue automation, and close management to help finance teams close books faster and manage multi-entity accounting (raised $35M).
5. Picsart is a design platform that turns ideas into professional content without design experience.
6. Higgsfield Soul turns your text into hyper-realistic photos with 50+ style presets that look like real smartphone pics, and is now free to use.
7. Proread turns dense documents into interactive research maps you can explore—here’s a demo based on YCombinator founder Paul Graham’s essays.
8. Scira searches the web, YouTube, Reddit, and X simultaneously and organizes your results by source, giving you a clean open source alternative to Perplexity.
9. HN Slop generates AI startup ideas by scanning the front page of Hacker News.

See our top 51 AI Tools for Business here!

Around the Horn.

• Correction: The US Senate on Monday night actually completely removed the AI provision from the “Big Beautiful Bill” (we reported earlier they amended it).
• Amazon announced it now has over 1M robots working in its factories.
• Grammarly acquired email startup Superhuman in a push to build an AI-powered productivity suite; the company was last valued at $825M.
• Google struck a deal to buy 200MW of fusion power from MIT spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems for its energy-hungry Virginia data centers.
• Anysphere, maker of Cursor, just swiped two senior leads who created the immensely popular Claude Code as maker Anthropic reached $4B in annual recurring revenue (so current month’s subscription revenue times 12).
• xAI will experiment with letting AI generate Community Notes, its internal “fact checking” system where users who usually disagree must agree on a base truth.
• The students who made glasses that can lookup anyone are now piloting them as a commercial product (for seemingly much less invasive purposes).
• Chai Discovery released Chai 2, an AI model that designs antibodies by predicting which molecular structures will work against specific targets, achieving a >15% success rate in just 2 weeks without needing multiple rounds of lab testing (paper).

For the latest AI deep dives, check out our Explainer articles here!

Midweek Wisdom

Dylan Patel: GPT4.5's Flop, Grok 4, Meta's Poaching Spree, Apple's Failure, and Super Intelligence

• If you watch one AI interview this week, watch this one; It’s Matt Berman’s chat w/ Dylan Patel, the best writer covering AI chips and data centers, and who is a wealth of insight on what’s happening in the industry. For example:
  • All the complicated in’s and out’s of Microsoft and OpenAI’s bumpy relationship right now (15:33).
  • A pretty technical but very informative post-mortem on OpenAI’s GPT 4.5 and what went wrong (22:28)
  • The beef between Apple and NVIDIA, which could be one reason why Apple is behind in the AI race (31:06).
  • NVIDIA’s role in the AI industry as both a cloud kingmaker (41:31) and cloud disruptor (43:13)—as Dylan says, “You don’t mess with God. What Jensen giveth, Jensen taketh,” and cloud companies are mad.
  • Elon’s Grok 3.5 and what’s going on there (52:49).
  • What model he goes to the most (51:30), which depending on the topic is ChatGPT o3, Claude 4, or Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Grok 3. You should use the best model for you, but Dylan’s pretty based, so worth considering his use cases for each!
  • And who his pick is to win the “superintelligence” race… and why (1:01:01).

Check out all of our Intelligent Insights from June here!

A Cat's Commentary.