Cloudflare, a tech company that helps websites secure and manage their internet traffic, said on Tuesday that it had rolled out a new permission-based setting that allows customers to automatically block artificial intelligence companies from collecting their digital data, a move that has implications for publishers and the race to build A.I. With Cloudflare’s new setting, websites can block — by default — online bots that scrape their data, requiring the website owner to grant access for a bot to collect the content, the company said. In the past, those whom Cloudflare did not flag as a hacker or malicious actor could get through to a website to gather its information.

What this means in terms of this news is that Cloudflare defaults are a big deal, and this is a pretty audacious display of power. Cloudflare launched an “easy button” to block AI crawlers a year ago, and says more than 1 million customers have enabled this feature since then. That, however, was an affirmative choice; now tens of millions of websites will block AI crawlers with immediate effect, unless they affirmatively agree to be crawled