How Cloudflare Is Turning the Web Into an AI Playground
Cloudflare aims to make tools accessible to developers of all levels for building AI applications and agents, much like what it achieved for web infrastructure. The company appears to be betting on a future where developers can create and deploy agents and AI applications as easily as setting up a Content Delivery Network (CDN), for which the company is well-known. For developers, this signifies a future in which creating an AI agent doesn’t necessitate a PhD or an exorbitant computing bill. Cloudflare aims to simplify the infrastructure and reduce the barrier to entry for anyone with a product idea and a few lines of code. Developer Tools Without the Heavy Lifting The focus is shifting from training massive models to running inference at scale, and Cloudflare sees an opportunity. In an exclusive interaction, Rita Kozlov, VP of Product at Cloudflare, told AIM, “Cloudflare’s network happens to be the perfect place for inference to take place.” She believes that while many AI tasks will be processed locally on devices, Cloudflare’s network provides a nearby solution for larger AI models or tasks that exceed the computational capacity of phones or cars. “We believe that generative AI is going to evolve into the use of agents, so that AI systems are not just creating new context like text or images, but actually taking action autonomously, making decisions, and adapting to changing environments.” She explained that AI agents typically rely on three core components: a large language model, an orchestration layer with memory, and the ability to take external actions. Cloudflare now offers developer-ready building blocks for all three: Workers AI, Durable Objects, and its emerging MCP protocol. Kozlov said, “Cloudflare’s developer platform provides all the necessary building blocks you need to host an MCP server and helps you assemble them through their MCP libraries.” “All the pieces that developers would have to implement themselves, such as the transport layer and authentication, are taken care of out of the box.” The result is a dramatically shorter development cycle. Some companies had an MCP server built in less than 24 hours, highlighted Kozlov. Also, Agents.cloudflare.com, a resource hub with SDKs, templates, and documentation tailored to help developers get started quickly, reinforces accessibility with these abilities. Even Cloudflare’s core web tools are becoming more developer-friendly through AI. “Our first AI agent, Cloudy, can create and configure rules for you with natural language,” Kozlov noted, pointing to how agentic interfaces are integrated into everyday products like WAF and CDN. Affordable AI for Every Developer Cloudflare’s pricing strategy promotes experimentation. “Cloudflare Workers is the first serverless platform that truly scales down to zero – because developers no longer need to size their applications or worry about which region it’ll run in,” stated Kozlov. “We only charge for CPU time, so you are not charged for the time spent waiting for I/O.” That usage-based model, paired with GPU access across over 190 global cities, positions Cloudflare as a low-cost, high-speed option for developers building AI applications. “We only want you to pay for what you use,” Kozlov added, underscoring the flexibility of its infrastructure. Putting together all these factors, Kozlov believes that Cloudflare is the most affordable place to build agents and AI applications. Still, enabling agents to act responsibly poses a unique challenge, particularly in a web ecosystem that often views bots as hostile. “The biggest challenge we’re seeing in the AI agent ecosystem is authenticating and authorising agents to take actions on behalf of humans, in a web that’s used to treating bot traffic as bad,” she said. Cloudflare’s proposals—HTTP message signatures and request mTLS—aim to allow trusted agents to prove their identity without disrupting security. Kozlov stated that Cloudflare aims to simplify AI agent development by offering straightforward integrations with Stytch, Auth0, and WorkOS. These integrations allow developers to incorporate authentication and authorisation into their remote MCP servers easily. Cloudflare isn’t declaring victory just yet, but it’s actively listening to the developer community. “It’s so early in the AI agent space,” Kozlov said. “We are always talking to customers and active across X and Discord to hear from developers on what they are looking for and how we can help improve their experience.” By prioritising simplicity, developer speed, and cost-efficiency, Cloudflare is hoping to make AI agent development just another line of code, something developers everywhere can build into their everyday stack.
“We only charge for CPU time, so you’re not being charged for the duration of time spent waiting on I/O.”
“We only charge for CPU time, so you’re not being charged for the duration of time spent waiting on I/O.”
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["AI", "generative AI", "Aim", "serverless", "R", "Go", "Rust", "AI agents", "programming_languages:R", "programming_languages:Go"]
I am a tech aficionado and a computer science graduate with a keen interest in AI, Coding, Open Source, and Cloud. Have a tip? Reach out to ankush.das@aimmediahouse.com