Introducing Precursor: detecting agentic behavior with continuous client-side signals
Bot mitigation is an adversarial game: attackers adapt, defenders respond, and the cycle continues. At Cloudflare, we stay ahead by combining visibility across our global network with signals from the client-side environment. At the network level, we analyze over 1 trillion requests per day to understand reputation, patterns, and anomalies across more than 20% of the web. On the client side, we’ve pushed detection deeper with Cloudflare Turnstile, which has evolved from a CAPTCHA replacement to a risk-based managed challenge that adapts the amount of friction needed to verify the user is authentic.
Today, Turnstile runs nearly 3 billion times per day on some of the most sensitive endpoints on the Internet, helping verify users at key moments like login, signup, and checkout. This improves protection on the most important areas of customer applications, but still leaves limited visibility into the rest of the application — how humans and bots actually interact across the full user journey.
This is the visibility gap we’re closing today with our launch of Precursor.
Precursor is a client-side, session-based verification system, built with privacy in mind, that uses dynamically injected JavaScript to continuously collect behavioral signals as visitors interact with your Continue reading
Improving Smart Tiered Cache for Public Cloud Regions
In 2021, we shipped Smart Tiered Cache. The idea: for each origin behind your site, Cloudflare picks the single best upper-tier data center to route through, based on real-time latency. Flip one switch, and we find the fastest path from our network to your origin.
That works as long as an origin IP lives in one fixed place. Public cloud origins usually don't. They sit behind anycast or regional unicast front ends, so one origin IP can look equally close to a dozen Cloudflare data centers at once — and the latency probes have nothing to lock onto. Smart Tiered Cache handles this the safe way: when there's no clear winner, it falls back to several upper tiers. Nothing breaks. You just lose the thing that made a single closest tier worth it, which is cache efficiency.
Smart Tiered Cache for Public Cloud Regions fixes this by letting you provide a cloud region hint. With that hint, Cloudflare can map public cloud origins to the right region and select better primary and fallback upper tiers, even when the origin IP itself looks anycast or ambiguous.
Since it was launched, Smart Tiered Continue reading
Why we cannot wait for better post-quantum signature algorithms
RSA and ECC, cryptographic algorithms that we’ve all relied on for decades, are vulnerable to the attack of sufficiently advanced quantum computers. Such quantum computers do not exist yet, but they seem to be coming sooner than expected. Luckily, the solution is already available: migrate to ML-KEM encryption and ML-DSA signatures, which are designed to be resistant to quantum attack. They were standardized in 2024 by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) after an eight-year open international competition.
The migration to post-quantum cryptography is in full swing now. At the time of writing, the majority of traffic handled by Cloudflare is already using ML-KEM encryption, and is thus secured against the threat to data posed by harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks. But encryption is only one part of the equation: to be fully secure against quantum computers capable of breaking classical cryptography, we aim to deploy post-quantum signatures to protect authentication systems from unauthorized access. We are targeting 2029 for Cloudflare to be fully post-quantum secure.
ML-DSA, the best all-around post-quantum signature scheme standardized today, has its downsides: it’s much larger on the wire, and many tricks we were able to perform with RSA and ECC simply cannot be Continue reading
Introducing Meerkat: an experiment in global consensus
Many internal services at Cloudflare need to read and modify the same control-plane state from across our 330+ global data centers. They need guarantees that different readers never see inconsistent state, and that the system remains available for writes even when some data centers or links fail.
But Cloudflare’s network runs across the entire Internet, and the Internet is an unpredictable place. Servers and data centers go down. Queues fill up. Links and cables get cut. These conditions make it difficult to run a globally available data system that guarantees strong consistency (e.g., that all readers are guaranteed to read all prior writes) because hostile conditions hinder distributed system replicas’ ability to reliably synchronize data with one another.
One way to synchronize data safely despite adverse network conditions is via a consensus algorithm, which allows a set of machines to agree on the same sequence of values, such as key-value store put and get operations, as long as a majority remains alive and able to communicate.
Unfortunately, commonly deployed consensus algorithms like Raft suffer in wide-area networks like Cloudflare’s because they rely on leaders and timeouts. The leader is the only replica allowed to make writes, and Continue reading
Cloudflare proudly joins the UK government’s Cyber Resilience Pledge
Today, the UK government launched the Cyber Resilience Pledge: a voluntary framework inviting organizations to commit to foundational cybersecurity governance, board-level accountability, and comprehensive cybersecurity coverage across supply chains. Cloudflare is proud to join the pledge’s founding cohort of signatories and continue our long-standing work with the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), National Cyber Security Centre, and others to shape a more secure, future-ready digital economy for the UK.
The pledge's core pillars — democratizing security, leadership accountability, and radical transparency — have been at the heart of Cloudflare since day one. Instead of approaching this framework as a new set of commitments to meet, we see it as a welcome validation from the UK government of the security philosophy and principles Cloudflare has championed for over a decade. We are glad to see the rest of the industry moving in this direction.
This pledge is an important step, and it comes at a time of significant cyber risk. In the first quarter of 2026, Cloudflare's global network blocked an average of 234 billion cyber threats every day. Recently, we mitigated a hyper-volumetric DDoS attack that peaked at 31.4 Tbps. At the end of 2025, Cloudflare Continue reading
Your Worker can now have its own cache in front of it
Today we are launching Workers Cache: a tiered cache that sits in front of your Worker, configured by a single line of Wrangler config and the same Cache-Control headers you already know.
When Workers Cache is enabled, every cacheable request to your Worker hits Cloudflare's cache first. If there's a fresh cached response, Cloudflare returns it directly — your Worker doesn't run, and you don't pay CPU time for it. On a miss, your Worker runs, and if your response is cacheable, Cloudflare stores it for the next request. The next request from anywhere on Earth can be served straight from cache.
The whole thing is one config block:
{
"name": "my-worker",
"main": "src/index.ts",
"compatibility_date": "2026-05-01",
"cache": {
"enabled": true
}
}After that, you control caching the way HTTP has always wanted you to — by setting headers on your responses:
return new Response(body, {
headers: {
"Cache-Control": "public, max-age=300, stale-while-revalidate=3600",
"Cache-Tag": "products,product:123",
},
});And when content changes, your Worker purges its own cache:
await ctx.cache.purge({ tags: ["product:123"] });That's the whole API. There is no zone to configure, no rules engine to set up, no separate cache to provision, and no second product Continue reading
Your site, your rules: new AI traffic options for all customers
One year ago, we declared the first Content Independence Day, and we gave website owners the means to take back control of their content. The deal between crawlers and website owners that had held up for 30 years — we crawl you, and you get referrals — was no longer true. AI was taking everything and sending back nothing, presenting an existential threat to website owners. And so we launched a one-click "Block AI Bots" option, along with a Pay-Per-Crawl marketplace.
A lot has changed in a year. Last July, conversations around “AI bots” centered around blocking AI training without compensation, pointing to the win–lose deal where content was used for model training with no value driven back to the website owner. But a desire for more nuance has emerged: Content owners still want to be able to protect their content, and they should be compensated for the original content that they work hard to create, curate, and share. We also know that locking down content isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution; website owners want more options than resorting to “block all automation, every time.”
If you run a small site, the problem isn’t just that someone could train models Continue reading
Making AI search smarter
Search drives most experiences on the web. It's how we get things done, and how nearly everything on the web gets found — the creators, the merchants, the answer to whatever you just typed into a box. For nearly 30 years, that discovery journey ran on a simple bargain: let a search engine crawl your content, and it sends you visitors. You turned those visitors into a business — through ads, subscriptions, or just the audience itself. Being discoverable and getting paid were the same thing. A year ago, on the first Content Independence Day, we drew a line to defend that bargain in the AI era. But a line in the sand was only a first step. Since then, the prevalence of AI search in consumers’ lives has only accelerated as more than 50% of traffic online is non-human. The threat is no longer a handful of training crawlers you can block; it's search itself being rebuilt around AI answers.
Today's answer engines read your page and hand the user a summary, so the visit — and the revenue that depended on it — isn’t needed. We see it firsthand, and independent research backs it up: a 2025 Continue reading
Content Independence Day, one year on: building the business model for the agentic Internet
One year ago, we declared Content Independence Day. At the time, we could see what many in the industry were beginning to sense: the fundamental economics of the Internet were shifting. AI adoption was accelerating, publishers were experiencing rapid declines in referral traffic, and AI companies were crawling the web at unprecedented scale, often without clearly declaring intent, and almost always without compensation.
We changed the defaults. For all new domains on Cloudflare, AI training crawlers would be blocked by default unless domain owners chose otherwise. We didn't do this to wall off the web. We did it because we believed a healthier ecosystem required transparency, control, scarcity, and ultimately, a market where high-quality content could be valued and exchanged fairly.
A year later, that market has emerged. But the transformation of the Internet has happened even faster than we anticipated. In this report, we share key data points that illustrate how quickly the business model of the Internet has shifted – and what this new content market means for publishers and site owners.
AI is not just another technology cycle. It is a platform Continue reading
Announcing the Monetization Gateway: charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402
Today, we are announcing the Cloudflare Monetization Gateway, an engine that will give Cloudflare customers the ability to charge for any asset protected by Cloudflare: web pages, datasets, APIs, or MCP tools.
It will provide a single control plane to manage payment policies and access controls across your applications, while also protecting your origin from high payment volumes by handling payment verification and enforcement at the edge. At launch, payments will settle in stablecoins over x402, the open protocol we are building with a coalition of more than 25 industry leaders via the x402 Foundation.
For 30 years, the web has run on a simple economic bargain: trading content for human attention. That attention has been monetized through advertising, subscriptions, and e-commerce. This bargain funded the Internet as we know it.
But as agents become the dominant Internet users, the model is breaking. An agent does not look at ads or need to maintain a monthly subscription to all the tools it wants to access. It reads a page or consumes a data feed once, takes what it needs, and moves on. Across the web, AI crawlers already request Continue reading
Unmasking the crawls with Attribution Business Insights
Original content is the lifeblood of conversations and curiosities. Imagine a world without it: we could find a thousand ways to regurgitate the same material that’s already been created, but we would witness the decline of fresh ideas and arguments.
Website owners fuel the ecosystem of ideas, news, and interesting tidbits, but they face the increasingly complex challenge of managing traffic to their websites and being paid for their content. While some bot traffic is clearly malicious, it isn’t always obvious when a particular AI crawler is helping or harming your business. To answer this, site owners need granular, reliable data to differentiate between traffic that provides value, and traffic that strains resources while eroding the foundation of their business model: actual humans consuming their content.
At Cloudflare, we hold a core belief: website owners have the right to control access to their content. We want to help website owners maintain their high-quality content and regulate AI traffic.
To provide much-needed clarity and help website owners take control, we’re excited to announce the new Attribution Business Insights dashboard — designed with business decision-makers and publishers in mind.
For decades, the business model of Continue reading
How we built saga rollbacks for Cloudflare Workflows
Cloudflare Workflows allows you to build durable, multi-step applications with built-in retries and state persistence across long-running processes. When a Workflow executes, each step can call external systems, retry failures, and persist state across restarts. But if one step fails, it may leave earlier work from completed steps in an inconsistent or partial state.
Today we’re shipping saga rollbacks for Workflows, allowing you to declare rollback logic within the step itself, in case of failure.
For example, consider a workflow for transferring funds between accounts at two different banks:
Debit from account at Bank A
Credit to account at Bank B
Send email confirmation to both account owners
What happens if Step 2, the credit to account at Bank B, fails? Once the debit succeeds at Bank A, the transaction is committed and the money has left its system. As the orchestrator of the transaction, you cannot simply “undo” the operation in Bank A's system. Instead, the money must be credited back to the account at Bank A through a new operation that semantically reverses the first one.
This pairing of an operation and its compensation logic is called the saga pattern.
Before today, developers had to implement their own Continue reading
Unlocking the Cloudflare app ecosystem with OAuth for all
Cloudflare provides services that help run 20% of the web, but we don’t do it alone. Developers on our platform use a myriad of tools and services from other companies too. Cloudflare provides a rich API for our platform that enables developers to create automations, CI/CD, and integrations that glue together the various parts of their infrastructure. Earlier this month, we announced self-managed OAuth, making it easier for customers to create and manage their own OAuth clients for delegated access to the Cloudflare API.
Cloudflare isn’t new to OAuth. If you’ve used Wrangler, or used integrations from partners like PlanetScale, then you’ve already used it. However, until now, third-party OAuth was only available through a small number of manually onboarded integrations, and was not available to developers more broadly. That meant developers building their own integrations had to rely on API tokens, which are harder to manage and a poor fit for many delegated application flows.
Over the last year, we onboarded a growing number of early partners while improving the consent, revocation, and security model behind Cloudflare OAuth. But as our Developer Platform grew and agentic tools drove demand for delegated access, it became clear that opening Continue reading
The post-quantum EO is an important milestone. Now it’s time to get to work
On June 22, 2026, President Trump signed Executive Order 14409, "Securing the Nation Against Advanced Cryptographic Attacks." The order sets a December 31, 2030, deadline for federal agencies to transition their most sensitive systems to post-quantum encryption, and a December 31, 2031, deadline for post-quantum authentication. The EO also directs federal contractors to comply with post-quantum Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) by the end of 2030.
We welcome this executive order. The U.S. government has a long track record of using federal leadership and procurement to drive adoption of new technologies across the broader industry. We've seen this work with IPv6, with routing security and the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), and with DNSSEC, and we’re glad to see this tradition continue with post-quantum cryptography.
The EO is especially important at this moment because the timeline for Q-Day, the day that quantum computers can break the public-key cryptography used across the Internet, has been accelerated. In April 2026, Cloudflare moved our own target for full post-quantum security to 2029, following research breakthroughs from Google and Oratomic. This EO updates guidance from 2024, when the National Institute of Standards Continue reading
How we found a bug in the hyper HTTP library
The Images service, built in Rust on Workers, runs on every machine in Cloudflare’s edge network. To handle client connections, we use hyper, an open-source HTTP library for Rust.
Last year, we introduced the Images binding to enable custom, programmatic workflows for processing remote images in Workers. At the end of 2025, we rearchitected the binding to provide a more direct, local connection between the Workers runtime and the Images service.
Shortly after rollout, we received reports that transformation requests from the binding were failing — but only intermittently and only for larger images. Even stranger, the responses for these requests returned a 200 status without any errors logged. The image data was simply cut short: A response that should have been two megabytes might arrive with a few hundred kilobytes instead.
We spent six weeks chasing a nearly invisible bug — a race condition that occurred only under specific conditions — in the hyper library that impacted how the Images binding returned processed image data back to the client. In the end, it took four lines of code to fix it.
When developers build on Cloudflare, they compose full-stack applications from a set Continue reading
Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for AI agents
Everyone's writing code with AI agents today. But the moment an agent needs to deploy something — and needs to sign up and create an account — it slams face-first into a wall built for humans: a browser-based OAuth flow, a dashboard to click through, an API token to copy-paste, a multi-factor authentication prompt to satisfy. For an interactive copilot sitting next to a developer, that's annoying. For a background agent, it's a hard stop.
Today we're rolling out Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for Agents.
Agents can now deploy websites, APIs, and agents right away, without first needing to sign up for an account.
Any agent can now run wrangler deploy --temporary and deploy a Worker to Cloudflare. This temporary deployment stays live for 60 minutes, during which time you can claim the temporary account, making it permanently your own. If you don't, it expires on its own.
Our goal? Let your agent code and ship.
Frictionless temporary accounts matter more than it might first seem:
Background AI sessions have no human in the loop, and are becoming the norm. Any auth step that needs a browser, a copy-paste, or "click here Continue reading
Build your own vulnerability harness
A few weeks ago, we published our initial findings from Project Glasswing, looking at what happens when you point frontier security models at an enterprise codebase. We also explored how our defensive structures adapt to protect our infrastructure and customers from threats posed by frontier AI. Since then, the AI ecosystem has continued to shift rapidly — developers who've built tightly around a single model have already experienced what happens when that model is no longer available or gets superseded by a more capable one. These market shifts only reinforce our core thesis: no matter which underlying model is leading the pack on any given day, the future of agentic workflows will not be found in standalone models, prompts, or single-agent sessions.
Moving from a localized security "skill" to a continuous, fleet-wide scanning pipeline requires an architecture where models are treated as interchangeable components. Relying on a single model inherently limits defensive coverage, as the same system will tend to look at code paths through the exact same lens. To counter this, models should be frequently interchanged and cross-tested. By varying the models across the pipeline — such as using one model for initial discovery and an entirely different Continue reading
Celebrating 12 years of Project Galileo
Twelve years ago this month, Cloudflare launched an ambitious project built on a simple idea: people shouldn’t be knocked offline just because someone more powerful disagrees with them. Today, Project Galileo provides free access to cybersecurity services to more than 3,400 websites belonging to journalists, human rights defenders, and other nonprofit organizations in 120 countries. We continue to believe that a better Internet is one where anyone with an idea can reach a global audience.
Each year on the anniversary of Project Galileo, we announce new products, programs, and strategic partnerships. To celebrate our 12th anniversary this year, we’re publishing our first comprehensive report on cyberattacks targeting civil society, releasing case studies that explore the security needs of 16 Project Galileo participants, and announcing new project partners.
Because Project Galileo now includes 3,400 domains belonging to organizations in over 120 countries, Cloudflare has access to unique data regarding the cyber threats, attacks, and trends targeting civil society — a critical pillar of global democracy. In addition, because the Cloudflare network spans more than 335 cities in 125 countries and more than 20% of the web sits behind it, Continue reading
Bringing more agent harnesses and frameworks to Cloudflare, starting with Flue
2026 is the year agent harnesses go to production. The software that controls the model’s access to the outside world — harnesses like Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode, Pi, and Project Think — has matured to the point where teams are deploying agents as real, load-bearing infrastructure, not just prototypes.
But building agents that survive production is hard.
We learned this firsthand building Project Think as our first-party agent harness. In working with our customers to run agents in production, we found a common set of distributed systems problems that every agent faces when running in the cloud. When an agent is interrupted, how can it automatically and gracefully resume from where it left off, without losing context or wasting tokens? How can agents run untrusted code securely? How can agents use the tools they were trained for?
A harness can’t solve these problems on its own. They’re tied to state, storage and compute — which means they’re dependent on the platform the agent runs on. That’s why we’re taking our learnings from hardening Project Think for production and bringing them to the Cloudflare Agents SDK as a base layer. Durable execution, dynamic code execution, a durable filesystem and dynamic Continue reading
Introducing the Cloudflare One stack: agent-powered deployment
Adopting or migrating to a Zero Trust network architecture can be a daunting task. Before a single policy changes, teams have to recall how their network is actually built: which applications exist, their authentication and authorization constructs, how traffic flows between them, and any assumptions the current architecture makes. This hands-on process requires practitioners to decode the intent behind every security and routing policy in place.
Today, we’re releasing the Cloudflare One stack, a set of skills you give to your agent to configure, deploy, and manage your Zero Trust environment for you. This toolkit is designed to help automate the process of learning an entirely new security suite and mapping your existing one into Cloudflare.
Cloudflare has worked with thousands of customers through exactly this process. That repetition built expertise on where migrations stall, what questions come up every time, and what it takes to move forward. The Cloudflare One stack packages that expertise and makes it more accessible than ever.
Teams are already using agents to write code, triage alerts, and automate workflows. Organizations are increasingly asking for Cloudflare-provided tooling to help agents execute on security workflows. On their own, agents Continue reading