How AI is Starving the Internet

For decades, the internet ran on a simple economic contract: creators publish content, search engines organise it, and humans click on it. That click was the currency of the open web.

But in 2025, that contract is unraveling. Nan Hao Maguire of Cloudflare reveals that the internet is shifting from a human utility to a "Machine-to-Machine Economy." With AI crawlers like Google Bot consuming data without sending traffic back, we are seeing a 24-25% "referral deficit" that threatens to bankrupt the creator economy.

We also dive into the dark side of this shift: the rise of Agentic AI and autonomous cyber threats. Cloudflare’s data shows a terrifying escalation in brute force, with the Aisuru botnet hitting peak attack rates of 31.4 terabits per second, a scale that legacy infrastructure simply cannot survive.

We discuss:

• The Broken Contract: How AI crawlers are creating a "referral deficit" by scraping answers without providing clicks, forcing creators toward "pay-per-crawl" licensing models.

• The Machine Web: Why 31% of all internet traffic is now bot-originated, and how we are moving from "AI as a tool" to "AI as a teammate" (Agentic AI).

• The Aisuru Escalation: The massive leap in cyber attack volume from 7.9 Tbps to 31.4 Tbps in just months, and why most providers fail past the 20 Tbps mark.

• Malaysia’s Vulnerability: Why "People in Society" (individuals) have become the #1 cyber target in Malaysia, surpassing banks and government agencies.

• Autonomous Defense: The shift toward "AI vs. AI" warfare, where autonomous defense systems are the only way to counter agentic attacks.

• The Quantum Leap: The silent positive trend of Post-Quantum Encryption, which has jumped from 30% to 52% adoption on Cloudflare’s network.

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