A high-stakes war has just broken out over the future of the internet. In one corner is Cloudflare, a giant of web infrastructure that acts as a gatekeeper for a huge portion of online traffic. In the other is Perplexity, a darling of the AI world, a search engine threatening to upend Google’s dominance.

The accusation is explosive: Cloudflare claims Perplexity is a bad actor, a rogue bot that ignores the internet’s oldest rules to secretly scrape data from websites that have explicitly told it to stay away. Perplexity’s response is just as fiery: it says Cloudflare is either dangerously incompetent or engaged in a publicity stunt, fundamentally misunderstanding how modern AI works.

The feud is the first major battle in a conflict that will define the next era of the web: Who gets to acc

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