26 September 2026

Cloudflare CEO: bot traffic on the internet has already overtaken human traffic

Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, said on the Decoder podcast that according to company data, traffic generated automatically by bots and AI agents surpassed human-generated traffic on the internet in May, and in five years it could be as much as a thousand times larger. Since bots don't click on ads, Cloudflare, together with Coinbase and Stripe, wants them to pay a fraction of a cent for every piece of content they fetch. Prince also expects the local newspaper in Park City that he owns with his wife to make more this year from licensing to AI companies than from online ads.

The Verge ↗

From recent days

New York court sentences Michael Smith to 18 months in prison - his bots played AI songs billions of times, earning him over $8 million in royalties

Judge John G. Koeltl on Tuesday, October 6, sentenced Michael Smith, 54, of North Carolina to 18 months in prison and two years of supervised release and ordered the forfeiture of $8,091,843.64, the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York said. According to prosecutors, from 2017 to 2024 Smith ran thousands of fake accounts (up to 10,000 at once) that streamed hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs billions of times; in April 2023, Smith's bots using YouTube Music family plans played his music 80.9 million times, while Taylor Swift's entire catalog had 9.3 million plays on such plans. Smith pleaded guilty in March to conspiracy to commit fraud; it is the first criminal streaming fraud case in the US, Billboard reports, adding that the defense asked for no prison time and prosecutors for at least 46 months.

justice.gov ↗ Billboard ↗ Gizmodo ↗

Nvidia reportedly stops selling GB202 chips for the GeForce RTX 5090 - they will go only to professional and data center cards

Nvidia has stopped selling GB202 chips for GeForce RTX 5090 cards to partners, including for the D variants for the Chinese market, and the chips will go exclusively to professional and data center cards, Tom's Hardware reports, citing a factory notice revealed by leaker @hongxing2020 and confirmed by @Zed__Wang; Nvidia did not comment. The top GeForce model will be the RTX 5080 24 GB, and the 16 GB version will be discontinued. The professional RTX Pro 5500 card has the same number of CUDA cores as the RTX 5090 (21,760), but 84 GB of memory instead of 32 GB, and costs much more.

Tom's Hardware ↗

GPT-6 comes to ChatGPT with an "intelligent interface" - answers with charts, buttons and tools

OpenAI brought GPT-6 to regular ChatGPT chat along with Intelligent UI: the model decides on its own whether to answer with text or with a diagram, chart, form or interactive tool, such as a savings calculator or a bill-splitting tool. GPT-6 interleaves reasoning with answering, and for questions that require a web search, GPT-6 Instant starts answering 44 percent faster on average than GPT-5.6 Instant. Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise users get GPT-6 Sol starting October 7, and Free and Go users get the lighter GPT-6 Luna starting October 8; the models in ChatGPT Work and Codex are unchanged.

OpenAI ↗ The Verge ↗ 9to5Mac ↗

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