Cloudflare

Cloudflare is an infrastructure company that makes websites faster and safer. It was founded in 2009, and a large share of internet traffic passes through its network.

In AI, Cloudflare does two things. First, it hosts and serves open AI models on its own servers on behalf of others. Second, it blocks or puts a price on AI companies scraping other people's websites. The second role gets far more attention in the news, because Cloudflare has stepped in as a gatekeeper in the fight over AI taking news publishers' and creators' content for free.

Cloudflare doesn't build its own AI models. Every model running on its servers is an open model built by someone else, such as Meta, Google, or Mistral.

In August 2026, Cloudflare unveiled Kitesurf, a browser built specifically for AI agents. It's a move to claim the gatekeeper position early, betting that agents—not humans—will increasingly be the ones browsing the web.

"Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers" — this doesn't mean it's protecting its own models. It means Cloudflare is locking the door on behalf of the websites that run on its network.