Strava's Counterattack: How Platforms Are Fighting Back Against Ruthless AI Scraping

Strava's aggressive restrictions on data access represent a turning point in the conflict between AI companies' insatiable training data demands and the platforms that host user-generated content. As major AI labs continue to disregard basic web conventions like robots.txt, websites are forced to choose between remaining open or building paid, authenticated barriers to protect their data. This precedent could fundamentally reshape the internet's architecture, fragmenting what was once a freely accessible web as companies implement increasingly sophisticated controls over who accesses their data and how.