Tech Voices: Trump vs. Musk, Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers, Baidu AI

Seeking Alpha’s daily roundup of remarks and statements that could impact the technology sector.

• President Trump suggested early Tuesday that government subsidies benefitting Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), SpaceX (SPACE) and Starlink be cut to save money. Trump made the comments in response to Elon Musk’s scathing criticism of the Trump-backed spending bill before Congress.

“Elon may get more subsidy than any human being in history, by far, and without subsidies, Elon would probably have to close up shop and head back home to South Africa. No more Rocket launches, Satellites, or Electric Car Production, and our Country would save a FORTUNE. Perhaps we should have DOGE take a good, hard, look at this? BIG MONEY TO BE SAVED!!!,” Trump posted on Truth Social.

• Cloudflare (NYSE:NET) said it will start blocking AI crawlers from accessing content on websites without permission or compensation by default, adding that it is the first Internet infrastructure provider to do so.

“If the Internet is going to survive the age of AI, we need to give publishers the control they deserve and build a new economic model that works for everyone – creators, consumers, tomorrow’s AI founders, and the future of the web itself,” said Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, in a statement.

“AI crawlers have been scraping content without limits. Our goal is to put the power back in the hands of creators, while still helping AI companies innovate. This is about safeguarding the future of a free and vibrant Internet with a new model that works for everyone,” Prince added.

• China’s Huawei and Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) have open-sourced some of their AI models as part of their global expansion efforts.

Huawei announced Monday that it has open-sourced its Pangu Pro MoE 72B and Ascend-based model reasoning technology.

“We sincerely invite global developers, corporate partners and researchers to download and use it, provide feedback on usage, and improve it together,” Huawei said in a statement on Weibo.

Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), meanwhile, has open-sourced its Ernie 4.5 LLMs, according to a statement.