Latest news with #Cloudflare
Time Magazine
2 days ago
- Business
- Time Magazine
TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2025: Cloudflare
Cyber attacks were not in the headlines during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, thanks in part to cybersecurity firm Cloudflare, which it says blocked over 6 billion election-related threats the week of Nov. 5 alone. One of the world's largest network infrastructure and security firms, Cloudflare shores up about a fifth of the internet. It helps the owners of websites and apps keep service fast, as well as safe from the near-constant barrage of bad actors who exploit weaknesses to steal information or simply overwhelm online properties for financial or political gain. "We're able to sit in that stream of traffic, see all of the different requests that come to it, and be able to stop that," says Matthew Prince, cofounder and CEO. "We're sort of like the bodyguard of the internet." In 2024, it counted Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden as clients, in addition to candidates or authorities in six countries that also held elections. Cloudflare currently gifts its highest subscription tier to more than half of U.S. states as well as local governments for free through its ongoing Athenian Project.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Cloudflare
Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince Credit - Courtesy Cloudflare Cyber attacks were not in the headlines during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, thanks in part to cybersecurity firm Cloudflare, which it says blocked over 6 billion election-related threats the week of Nov. 5 alone. One of the world's largest network infrastructure and security firms, Cloudflare shores up about a fifth of the internet. It helps the owners of websites and apps keep service fast, as well as safe from the near-constant barrage of bad actors who exploit weaknesses to steal information or simply overwhelm online properties for financial or political gain. "We're able to sit in that stream of traffic, see all of the different requests that come to it, and be able to stop that," says Matthew Prince, cofounder and CEO. "We're sort of like the bodyguard of the internet." In 2024, it counted Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden as clients, in addition to candidates or authorities in six countries that also held elections. Cloudflare currently gifts its highest subscription tier to more than half of U.S. states as well as local governments for free through its ongoing Athenian Project. Contact us at letters@
Arabian Post
2 days ago
- Business
- Arabian Post
Cloudflare and OpenAI Unite to Power Persistent AI Agents
Cloudflare and OpenAI have unveiled a powerful integration enabling developers to build intelligent, stateful AI agents that combine OpenAI's reasoning with Cloudflare's scalable execution infrastructure. By pairing the OpenAI Agents SDK with Cloudflare's new Agents SDK and foundational technologies like Durable Objects and Workers, the collaboration delivers global reach, persistent memory, and human‑in‑the‑loop interaction, all within a serverless framework. The synergy addresses a key shortcoming of stateless AI agents. OpenAI's Agents SDK offers advanced cognition—planning, tool‑calling, decision‑making—yet leaves execution environment and persistence to the developer. Cloudflare's solution fills that gap: its Agents SDK runs atop Workers and Durable Objects, providing each agent a unique identity, durable memory store, built‑in scheduling, WebSocket connectivity and global low‑latency execution. Durable Objects act as the agent container. Each instantiation—based on a name or unique ID—carries its own state and storage, enabling multi‑session workflows, memory hydration, and asynchronous execution. Developers can create one agent per user, task, or domain, avoiding state entanglement while fostering modular, composable agent systems. For instance, one could build a triage agent that routes queries to specialist agents, each maintaining separate memory and logic. ADVERTISEMENT A standout feature is scalability through human‑in‑the‑loop control. Cloudflare's architecture enables agents to pause mid‑workflow, await human judgment, and resume—persisting intermediate steps and context across sessions. Knock, a third‑party messaging layer, exemplifies this. Developers have built virtual card‑issuing workflows where the AI agent pauses for approval before issuing a card—managed via Knock plus Cloudflare's SDK. Another innovation: agents are addressable beyond HTTP. Cloudflare's system supports Twilio‑backed phone‑call integrations, WebSocket real‑time sessions, email and pub/sub. This opens rich, multimodal use cases—voice, text, email—bound by a globally unique agent identity. Complementing these developments, a remote Model Context Protocol server has been introduced. Cloudflare now allows agents to host MCP servers directly, enabling structured tool integration and external service access via authenticated, remote endpoints using MCPAgent. The MCP feature dovetails neatly with Cloudflare's recent release of a free tier for Durable Objects and general availability of multi‑step Workflows, lowering the entry barrier for developers. Addition of the OpenAI Agents SDK and Responses API further enriches the landscape. OpenAI's Responses API supports dynamic web search, file system access and system‑level tasks; the Agents SDK coordinates multi‑agent orchestration. Paired with Cloudflare's persistent runtime, this empowers developers to build AI agents capable of real‑time research, memory‑backed workflows and inter‑agent communication. Underpinning this integration is Cloudflare's acquisition of Outerbase in April, a database platform company. The acquisition strengthens data infrastructure within Workers, Durable Objects and the Agents SDK—helping developers build rich, contextual, database‑backed AI systems. This move boosts long‑term memory storage and retrieval critical for agents maintaining evolving user context. Industry observers are taking notice. A Medium commentary described the duo as 'perfect complements: OpenAI's Agents SDK gives you the brain, the other gives you the body'. Cloudflare's CEO Matthew Prince emphasised that these developments remove 'cost and complexity barriers' to agent deployment, calling the MCP server release 'the industry's first remote MCP server'. Developers working with the Agents SDK can bootstrap agent projects via common workflows: installing via npm or using the agents‑starter template, extending the core Agent class to handle HTTP, WebSocket, scheduled tasks, SQL storage, and tool invocation. Integration with front‑end frameworks is supported through useAgent and useAgentChat React hooks, offering real‑time UI connections. Looking ahead, Cloudflare promises further enhancements: evaluation tooling, voice and video interactivity via WebRTC, richer email integration for human supervision, self‑hosting capabilities, structured output support, and deeper embedding with Worker AI, Vectorize, Log Explorer and AI Gateway. The evolving field of AI agents is entering a new phase—no longer demonstrations, but operational systems able to remember, adapt, collaborate, and operate at global scale. By combining cognitive reasoning with robust orchestration and persistence, developers are empowered to deploy production‑ready agents that are stateful, interactive and distributed. That shift stands to redefine automation, customer support, education, workflows and more—lowering development barriers, increasing resilience, and enabling agents that truly work on behalf of users across time, platforms and modalities.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Creative Commons debuts CC signals, a framework for an open AI ecosystem
Nonprofit Creative Commons, which spearheaded the licensing movement that allows creators to share their works while retaining copyright, is now preparing for the AI era. On Wednesday, the organization announced the launch of a new project, CC signals, which will allow dataset holders to detail how their content can or cannot be reused by machines, as in the case of training AI models. The idea is meant to create a balance between the open nature of the internet and the demand for ever more data to fuel AI. As Creative Commons explains in a blog post, the continued data extraction underway could erode openness on the internet and could see entities walling off their sites or guarding them with paywalls, instead of sharing access to their data. The CC signals project, on the other hand, aims to provide a legal and technical solution that would provide a framework for dataset sharing meant to be used between those who control the data and those who use it to train AI. Demand is increasing for such a tool, as companies grapple with changing their policies and terms of service to either limit AI training on their data or explain to what extent they'll use users' data for purposes related to AI. For instance, X initially made a change that allowed third parties to train their models on its public data, then later reversed that. Reddit is using its file, which is meant to tell automated web crawlers whether they can access its site, to restrict bots from scraping its data for training AI. Cloudflare is looking toward a solution that would charge AI bots for scraping, as well as tools for confusing them. And open source developers have also built tools to slow down and waste the resources of AI crawlers that didn't respect their 'no crawl' directives. The CC signals project instead proposes a different solution: a set of tools that offers a range of legal enforceability, but all of which have an ethical weight to them, similar to the CC licenses that today cover billions of openly licensed creative works online. 'CC signals are designed to sustain the commons in the age of AI,' said Anna Tumadóttir, Creative Commons CEO, in an announcement. 'Just as the CC licenses helped build the open web, we believe CC signals will help shape an open AI ecosystem grounded in reciprocity.' The project is only now beginning to take shape. Early designs have been published on the CC website and GitHub page. The organization is actively seeking public feedback ahead of its plans for an alpha launch (early test) in November 2025. It will also host a series of town halls for feedback and questions. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Globe and Mail
3 days ago
- Business
- Globe and Mail
Cloudflare Expands AI Tools: Will Revenue Growth Follow?
Cloudflare NET is implementing artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives across its portfolio and experiencing strong traction across AI Gateway, Workers AI and Durable Objects and Containers solutions. In the first quarter of fiscal 2025, NET reported a whopping year-over-year rise of 4,000% in its Workers AI inference requests and a 1,200% increase in AI Gateway requests. Cloudflare is further augmenting its solutions by implementing AI across its infrastructure and security suite. The company has launched the Model Context Protocol server, which is embedded inside the Workers Platform to ease the deployment of AI agents to streamline workflows, handle transactions, and simplify business data queries. This value addition has the potential to increase upsells and customer acquisition. Another recent addition to NET's portfolio is Cloudflare for AI, which is designed to enable businesses to adopt AI responsibly and at scale. The solution includes Data Loss Prevention for AI, which prevents sensitive data from leaking through prompts or model outputs; an AI Gateway, a fully-managed vector database for semantic search named Vectorize and Access for AI with Zero Trust controls. Global giants like Asana, Atlassian, Block, PayPal, Sentry, and Stripe are already working with Cloudflare to create powerful AI experiences. After the implementation of AI capabilities in its portfolio, Cloudflare expects to win several large deals. Cloudflare already had 250,819 paying customers at the end of the first quarter of fiscal 2025, up 27% year over year. NET added 30 new customers during the quarter that contributed more than $100,000 in annual revenues, taking the count of such customers to 3,527 at the end of the quarter. For 2025, Cloudflare anticipates its revenues between $2.09 billion and $2.094 billion. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the same is pegged at $2.09 billion, indicating a year-over-year rise of 25.38%. How Competitors Fare Against Cloudflare Cloudflare faces competition in multiple dimensions from Amazon AMZN. Amazon Web Services' ('AWS') Lambda, Bedrock, SageMaker, and API Gateway make it a direct competitor of Cloudflare in the serverless computing and AI inference space. AWS also offers vector databases and cybersecurity services like Cloudflare. Alphabet 's GOOGL Vertex AI, Cloud Run, Firebase, and AI/ML APIs, Google Cloud Platform offers solutions for AI development, model inference, and low-latency app deployment, making Alphabet a strong contender for Cloudflare. Cloudflare's AI initiatives have brought it head-on with cloud hyperscalers like Alphabet and Amazon in infrastructure and inference hosting, with enterprises switching to Cloudflare platform for its better performance, lower development cost and modernized platform. These factors will help NET boost its revenues. Cloudflare's Price Performance, Valuation and Estimates Shares of NET have surged 73.2% year to date compared with the Zacks Internet - Software industry's growth of 15.4%. From a valuation standpoint, NET trades at a forward price-to-sales ratio of 27.42X, higher than the industry's average of 5.8X. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for NET's 2025 and 2026 earnings implies year-over-year growth of 5.33% and 31.64%, respectively. The estimates for 2025 and 2026 earnings have been revised downward in the past 60 days and 30 days, respectively. NET currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here Only $1 to See All Zacks' Buys and Sells We're not kidding. Several years ago, we shocked our members by offering them 30-day access to all our picks for the total sum of only $1. No obligation to spend another cent. Thousands have taken advantage of this opportunity. Thousands did not - they thought there must be a catch. Yes, we do have a reason. We want you to get acquainted with our portfolio services like Surprise Trader, Stocks Under $10, Technology Innovators, and more, that closed 256 positions with double- and triple-digit gains in 2024 alone. See Stocks Now >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Inc. (AMZN): Free Stock Analysis Report Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL): Free Stock Analysis Report Cloudflare, Inc. (NET): Free Stock Analysis Report
