AI - Horizon Helix

The Rise of AI Bot Blockers: What It Means for the Future of Tech

Anthony Duran on July 3, 2025

Imagine waking up to find your entire website scraped overnight—your product listings, blog posts, even your pricing strategy; all copied, consumed, and used to train someone else’s AI model. No warning. No credit. No compensation.

That’s not a hypothetical. It’s happening every day to businesses just like yours.

In response, Cloudflare launched an AI bot blocker that fingerprints and halts suspicious traffic patterns. In just one day, it blocked bots across 85,000+ websites, a significant shift from passive monitoring to active defense.

Why AI Bot Blockers Matter

AI bots aren’t just scraping, they’re impersonating, phishing, and harvesting data at scale. With the average U.S. data breach costing $9.48 million in 2023 , every unauthorized bot interaction becomes a potential vulnerability.

This is about more than content theft, it’s about protecting trust, brand integrity, and infrastructure from increasingly sophisticated automation.

The Anthropic vs. Reddit Case

Just this month, Reddit sued Anthropic in San Francisco Superior Court, alleging the AI startup’s bots accessed Reddit’s content over 100,000 times since July 2024, despite claims they’d halted scraping

Key allegations include:

- Scraping Reddit data without licensing or consent
- Ignoring user-deletion protections in Reddit’s API
- Misrepresenting compliance while continuing covert scraping

Reddit’s suit invokes five claims, from breach of contract to unfair competition. In contrast, companies like OpenAI and Google maintain licensed agreements with Reddit’s data. The outcome could set a precedent for ethical data collection and AI governance.

Implications for the AI Industry

Anthropic’s case marks a legal turning point. With the EU AI Act and growing U.S. regulations targeting data usage and IP, the era of free-for-all scraping is likely ending.

Expectations are shifting toward:

- Licensed data access
- User protections (respecting deletion requests)
- Technical controls (bot blockers, API rate-limiting)

AI companies must pivot from passive acceptance to active compliance or risk legal and reputational fallout.

How Horizon Helix Can Help

Horizon Helix is forever vigilant in understanding and protecting their clients against the on going and developing cyber security threats.

Conclusion

The rise of AI bot blockers like Cloudflare’s and legal challenges like Reddit vs. Anthropic are signals of a tectonic shift in how data flows online. For cybersecurity leaders, IT teams, and tech developers, the question isn’t if, but when your systems will be tested. Are your defenses ready when the next wave of AI bots comes calling?

AI Could be Taking More Than it is Giving

Anthony Duran on May 7, 2025

What is Recall?

Microsoft first introduced Copilot’s Recall feature in May 2024 with the launch of Copilot+ PCs. Recall automatically captures encrypted snapshots of your screen every few seconds, allowing you to search your on-screen history using more colloquial language.

Credit: Microsoft

The data stays local on your device. After privacy concerns, Microsoft officially released Recall in April 2025 with improvements, including making Recall disabled by default which gives users more control over their involvement.

Security Concerns

Copilot’s Recall functionality is a great tool that can help many people; however, it is inherently dangerous to cyber and personal security. Apps like Signal, known for their safety by having disappearing messages, could be obsolete if even one of the users in a conversation has Recall since it can store sensitive information even after it is deleted from Signal.

Even if you opt out of Recall, whoever you are communicating with could be opted in, and your conversations or information shared could be stored, even after you delete them. Conversations will no longer be gone when deleted, but instead are saved to the opted-in user’s storage. Moreover, there is no notification that Recall is storing the information of a user (opted out) who is engaged in a conversation with another user who is using Recall.

Be cautious of what you share. It has been a common practice to be careful of what you share on the internet since its dawn, but now it could be more important than ever as even trusted people could inadvertently capture your information. Recall could still be a risk for someone who has opted out through daily conversations. As of now, the only way for Recall to not store information is for both parties to opt out.

Opting Out

Copilot’s Recall was re-released on the latest Windows 11 24h2 update (KB055627). Recall is only available on Copilot+ PCs. If you do not have a Copilot+ PC you do not have to worry about having Recall yet, but you will have to be wary about those who have a Copilot+ PC and have installed the newest update for Windows.

If you do have a Copilot+ PC and want to opt out, follow these steps:

Go to Settings > Privacy & security > Recall & snapshots. When you have navigated here, simply toggling it off.

If you want to keep it but only want it off for a day, you can easily pause Recall by selecting the Recall icon in your system tray and selecting the pause option.