AWS WAF Brought Back 402 Payment Required for the Agent Economy (opens in new tab)

AWS WAF added a feature called AI traffic monetization. It lets you charge AI bots that hit your site or API for access to your content. Until now, dealing with AI crawlers meant a binary choice, allow or block. This adds a third path: take payment and let them through. I won't go deep into the feature itself here, how a content owner sets up monetization. The official announcement covers that. What I want to look at is the other side. The story of the side defending content is, at the same t...