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Cloudflare wants to build the economic layer of the AI web

Cloudflare is positioning itself to create an economic infrastructure layer for AI-powered web services, aiming to enable developers to build, deploy, and monetize AI applications directly on its edge network, rather than relying on centralized cloud providers.

Background

- Cloudflare runs a massive global network (CDN, DNS, DDoS protection) that sits between most websites and their visitors. It now wants to become the payment and verification layer for AI agents interacting with the web. - The "AI web" means a web where AI bots (agents that browse, scrape, and act on content) become major traffic consumers alongside humans. - Core problem: websites can't easily charge AI bots for access, and AI companies can't easily verify legitimate bots or pay content owners at scale. - Cloudflare's approach combines its bot detection (to identify AI traffic), its Workers serverless platform (to execute pay-per-use logic at the network edge), and potentially crypto for micropayments. - Why it matters: it could create a new economic model for content creators, AI trainers, and inference providers — a toll system for the AI internet. - Previous web micropayment attempts failed; Cloudflare's position as intermediary for much of the web gives it unusual leverage to succeed.

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