A logo of CLOUDFLARE sits outside the company’s house on the opening day of the 55th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, January 20, 2025.
Yves Herman | Reuters
Cloudflare is acquiring artificial intelligence data marketplace Human Native, the company said Thursday, as it expands its push to develop transactions between AI developers and content creators.
“Content creators deserve full control over their work, whether they want to write for humans or optimize for AI,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in a release announcing the news.
The internet infrastructure company said the acquisition will help it build tools for AI developers to “find, access and purchase reliable high-quality data through fair and transparent channels.”
The press release didn’t specify the deal’s value, and a Cloudflare spokesperson declined to disclose further details.
Prince said the acquisition will help Cloudflare accelerate its development of a new system where AI developers will pay creators for any content they use to train their models.
Human Native, a UK startup, manages those transactions.
“This acquisition is about building the tools needed to protect the longevity of the open internet,” Prince said in the release.
In August, Prince told CNBC’s “Mad Money” that reshaping content monetization on the internet is evolving into a new mission for the company.
“As we’re helping content creators make sure that they can get paid and that the business model of the web continues to exist and evolve, I think that’s going to be the fourth act of Cloudflare,” he told Cramer.
Last summer, Cloudflare launched its AI Crawl Control product, which offers customers a way to restrict and or monetize “AI crawlers” — a nickname for bots that gather data from across the web to train large language models — on their sites.
Cloudflare’s cybersecurity products have allowed the stock to benefit from the AI trade, with shares up more than 60% in the last year.
