Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Perplexity Response to Cloudflare

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 48 posts

Re: Perplexity Response to Cloudflare

#3

Post by Tokumei-no-hito »

minimaxir wrote: post #2

Official post on their company blog (no idea why they reposted it on Twitter verbatim, that's bad SEO, ironically): https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/agents-or-bots-making-sen...

if what they're saying is true then this was a huge fuckup on CFs part. i was already a bit suspicious when they started gloating about OAI agent since it's been shown to literally state that it's solving a captcha to complete the task.

i guess it will come down to browserbase corroborating the claims.

Re: Perplexity Response to Cloudflare

#4

Post by posperson »

minimaxir wrote: post #2

Official post on their company blog (no idea why they reposted it on Twitter verbatim, that's bad SEO, ironically): https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/agents-or-bots-making-sen...

Perplexity using Cloudflare on their own website with the WAF security settings turned up is quite ironic

Re: Perplexity Response to Cloudflare

#5

Post by SilverElfin »

> When companies like Cloudflare mischaracterize user-driven AI assistants as malicious bots, they're arguing that any automated tool serving users should be suspect—a position that would criminalize email clients and web browsers, or any other service a would-be gatekeeper decided they don’t like.

I wonder if Perplexity or others mix the traffic of the two types so they’re indistinguishable, specifically to make this argument.

Re: Perplexity Response to Cloudflare

#9

Post by anon7000 »

Tokumei-no-hito wrote: post #3
minimaxir wrote: post #2

Official post on their company blog (no idea why they reposted it on Twitter verbatim, that's bad SEO, ironically): https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/agents-or-bots-making-sen...

if what they're saying is true then this was a huge fuckup on CFs part. i was already a bit suspicious when they started gloating about OAI agent since it's been shown to literally state that it's solving a captcha to complete the task. i guess it will come down to browserbase corroborating the claims.

Hm, it’s still a tricky question. Do web admins have a right to block agentic AI? Of course they do. They have a right to block whoever they want. Distinguishing between scraper and agent is important, yes, but agents can still produce a lot more traffic than the average human, and it’s not like the agents are optimizing their access patterns.

Re: Perplexity Response to Cloudflare

#10

Post by Tokumei-no-hito »

anon7000 wrote: post #9
Tokumei-no-hito wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if what they're saying is true then this was a huge fuckup on CFs part. i was already a bit suspicious when they started gloating about OAI agent since it's been shown to literally state that it's solving a captcha to complete the task. i guess it will come down to browserbase corroborating the claims.

Hm, it’s still a tricky question. Do web admins have a right to block agentic AI? Of course they do. They have a right to block whoever they want. Distinguishing between scraper and agent is important, yes, but agents can still produce a lot more traffic than the average human, and it’s not like the agents are optimizing their access patterns.

i agree. i think the point i agree with perplexity on is that CF is a central authority that is claiming to be the gatekeeper while (allegedly) being disingenuous and incapable.

i also tend to agree with the concept that scraping != consuming on behalf of a user. they explicitly point out that they do not store the data for training, which would fall under scraping by proxy.

Post reply on HN