Agentic AI
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Network Detection & Response
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Network Firewalls, Network Access Control
CEO Matthew Prince Says Non-Human Traffic Could Reach 1,000 Times Human Use
Michael Novinson (MichaelNovinson) ,
Tiffany Wang •
August 6, 2026
Image: Mamun Sheikh/Shutterstock
Managing bot traffic and securing the development of agents and agentic workloads is a better business than artificial intelligence data centers, Cloudflare told investors Thursday.
See Also: Embedded Security Tactics in a Modern Network Fabric
The San Francisco-based cloud services company is riding a surge of machine-generated traffic and attracting nearly 2 million new developers to build AI workloads on its Workers platform, said CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince.
“We’re just in a very different business than the hyperscalers,” Prince said during an earnings conference call. “What they’re selling is just a box, and it’s up to the customers in order to actually maximize the utilization. If we can get 10 times as much utilization out of every capex dollar, then we can continue to grow revenue.”
From a media company and a European technology firm to a U.S. federal agency and a generative AI startup, Prince said customers are seeking to secure and manage growing internet traffic and workloads while consolidating infrastructure and controlling costs.
AI is changing the economics of internet traffic, and companies are trying to figure out how to control non-revenue-generating bot visitors on their sites, Prince said.
The speed at which non-human activities grew was very much unexpected. Prince said he thought non-human traffic would exceed human traffic in the second half of 2027 when Cloudflare studied the numbers at the end of 2025, but that threshold was already reached this year.
“If the current trends continue, we think in five years non-human traffic will be as much as 1,000 times as much as human traffic,” Prince said. “In other words, humans will be a rounding error on the internet, not because human traffic goes down, but that’s just how fast we’re seeing non-human traffic grow.”
Those activities can be malicious denial-of-service attempts from bad actors, but they might also be unwanted traffic that’s considered malicious based on the website host’s business model, Prince said.
“It’s traffic that is maybe an AI company trying to take the content from a media company that relies on advertising,” Prince said. “And in those cases, we block that traffic and we don’t charge the customers anything more for blocking that traffic.”
Instead, Cloudflare said it is entertaining the idea of charging AI agents. The company unveiled a digital wallet this week that lays the foundation for agents to pay a fraction of a penny for each request they make, helping cover the cost of bandwidth, computing infrastructure and the content they consume, Prince said.
On the other hand, some companies welcome bot visits, and Cloudflare said it needs to distinguish what is wanted and what is not. “We’re doing everything we can not only to serve that, but to make it as efficient as possible to serve it,” Prince said. “Because if we’re going to have 1,000 times as much traffic online, we’ve got to get a lot more efficient.”
Cloudflare is also contributing to that future vision of an agentic internet. It provides what Prince called the “fastest, most secure and most cost-effective” platform for developers to build, deploy and scale agentic workloads.
“You only get charged for when it’s actually doing work,” Prince said. “You can spin things up and spin them down very, very quickly, and so it has become the go-to place for sophisticated developers to be able to launch code.” Small-shop developers are jumping in as well, making the cohort bigger overall, he said.
“If you look at companies like Lovable and Replit and Base 44 at Wix and others, a lot of times where that code is actually getting deployed and where the preferred target of that code is going is actually to Cloudflare,” Prince said. “That’s driving more and more developers.”