Can Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince save the web from AI?

Today, I’m talking with Matthew Prince, who is CEO of Cloudflare. This episode is part of a two-part series on the future of business. Matthew last joined us on the show about two and a half years ago, at what we thought then was a wild pivot point for the internet — and now it turns out things are even wilder because of AI, and Matthew and Cloudflare are right at the center of it. Cloudflare found in June that bots made up more than half of internet traffic. That number just keeps going up as more and more AI companies scrape more and more of the web, and now as more and more AI agents try and do things for people on the web. Cloudflare sits between websites and all those agents, and allows website owners some level of control: Owners can block all those AI tools, allow them, or, as you’ll hear, only allow those that might pay money for access. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. So Matthew and I talked about how to control all these bots, what kind of mess they’re making of the web, and what kinds of information might be valuable in the future as some of the payment schemes come into focus. You’ll hear me ask pretty directly if some of the outcomes he’s describing are actually good — Matthew is a thoughtful guy, and his answer is something I’m still thinking about well after we had this conversation. AI is also upending everything inside of Cloudflare. Earlier this year, the company laid off more than a thousand people — 20 percent of the company — and then Matthew wrote an op-ed about that decision that ran in the Wall Street Journal under the headline, “How I choose which Cloudflare employees to replace with AI.” That’s pure Decoder bait in every single dimension: AI, big controversial decisions, and org charts, all in one. And one last thing, before we get going: You can subscribe to Decoder on YouTube, where we put out new episodes every Monday and Thursday. Okay: Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Matthew Prince, you’re the cofounder and CEO of Cloudflare. Welcome back to Decoder. Thanks for having me. I’m really excited to talk to you again. It’s been about two years since you were on the show. I was just looking back over that episode and I said something to you like, “it’s a momentous time for the internet.” And I was not even close. It’s now an even more momentous time for the internet. You are at the forefront of rebooting how companies work with AI. That is the most Decoder bait of all time. I want to talk about bots and the internet and publishers and Google and all the things that you are in the middle of. But let’s start at the very beginning. Cloudflare is a complicated, important company. The last time you were on the show, you said, “Cloudflare is a service that makes the internet faster and protects it from bad guys.” Is that still how you would describe what Cloudflare does? That’s usually what I say when I’m trying to answer a question at a cocktail party and I don’t want to talk to the person any more. What I say if I’m interested in talking to the person more is that Cloudflare is trying to rebuild the internet the way it should have been built from the beginning if we knew how important it was going to be. We run a giant network. We’re in over 350 cities worldwide, literally thousands of data centers. We have equipment running in all those places, and then we do a handful of things. If you’re trying to put an application or content online, we make sure that it’s safe. If you’re a person or an employee online, we make sure that wherever you go online is safe. We help give people the ability to write applications that can scale to an entire internet audience and run on the infrastructure that we have. That’s the fastest-growing part of our business. We’ve recently started to think about how the business model of the internet is changing dramatically and we’re trying to help shape what that future business model of the internet looks like and make it as healthy as possible. Can I connect the dots between the business model of the internet, how the internet should have worked, and Cloudflare trying to build the internet as it should have been? That is different than, “Cloudflare protects from bad guys.” I will note that’s what you said to me last time, which now makes me feel like you don’t want to talk to me at the cocktail party, but that’s fine. That’s a shift. It’s just a notable shift. The business model of the internet has dramatically changed because of AI, because of bot traffic, because of AI scrapers, the whole thing. Describe what you think the business model of the internet is right now and what it should be. For at least the last at least 30 years, the business model of the internet has been advertising. It’s not the entire business model of the internet, but it’s really driven all of the growth of the web and built what we all enjoy today, which really is a miracle. The company that is responsible for that more than any other is Google, which for the last 28 years has really defined that. We all think about it for search, but they really built out all of the ecosystem around advertising online. They bought DoubleClick, they built things like Google Analytics that let you actually see who was coming to your property. It really is the hero of what I call the first generation of the internet and the first generation of the web. What’s changing though, very quickly, is who is actually using the web, or what is using the web. Last November I was at Web Summit, the big European tech event, and I was asked, “When do you think that non-human traffic — agents and all of those things — are going to pass human traffic online?” We have a lot of data because we see a huge percentage of the internet, so we pulled all of that data and looked at it and said that in the second half of 2027, automated traffic would become larger than human traffic. It felt like a big deal that we could see that for the first time in the internet’s history. I was asked again at South by Southwest in March of this year, 2026, and we pulled the data again and it had moved up, where it was going to then be the first half of 2027. We’re like, “Wow, this is growing. This AI thing is a big deal and people are using it like crazy and it’s driving a huge amount of traffic.” I was stunned when just a few months later in May, the team came to me and said, “You won’t believe it, but automated traffic has now passed human traffic online.” And that’s just expanding like crazy. If you extrapolate that out, with the giant caveat that I’ve gone wrong so far in every prediction that I’ve made on this, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online. Not because human traffic is going to decline, we think it’ll stay around the same, but because we’re just seeing such an explosion in all of the rest of the traffic. The challenge of that is, if you have 1,000 times more traffic, someone’s got to pay for the infrastructure to power that. That’s going to require bandwidth, that’s going to require servers, that’s going to require a lot of things in order to make that happen. And, the traditional model of how to pay for that, which was advertising, doesn’t work for bots. Bots don’t click on ads. They don’t respond to pretty swirls of paint and what we traditionally think of as a brand. We’ve got to come up with something else that’s going to power that incredible insatiable demand that’s going to be put on the internet going forward. I’m spending a lot of my time trying to think about what that’s going to look like. When you describe that as a business model, that implies that there’s going to be customers and revenue and profits. And I don’t know if any of that’s true. There’s certainly a lot of revenue. Well, maybe for the CloudFlares and the Googles of the world, but for the — Or for the Anthropics of the world! Anthropic added $10 billion of revenue in a single month. There is enormous demand for these AI services. And if you’re an AI company, what you really need are three things. You need great talent and researchers. And right now, that’s scarce. Right now we have a scarcity of people who really understand how to build these systems, but that’s going to change. Every single university in the world is standing back up their AI department. We’re training people like crazy. Labor markets are pretty efficient. We’re going to have more and more people coming into the space. The second thing that you need is chips. You need the silicon to run these things. Today, Nvidia is the best in the world at that, but you’ve got a whole bunch of others, whether that’s AMD or Qualcomm or all the hyperscalers, that are building their own chips in order to power these things. While we have a massive shortage in the availability of silicon and the ability to actually power it up and turn it on, that’s going to change as well. The third thing that you’ve always needed is the data to feed into all of these different models. And that’s been the one thing that I think is going to go the other direction. Historically we’ve just made the internet completely open and given bots access to all of the stuff that’s being created. I think that’s starting to change. We’re seeing a shift where more and more of the people who are creating content, really creating information, are saying, “Maybe we’ll give that away for free to humans, but if a bot is coming for it, then bots have to pay for it because they don’t have that traditional give-to-get. We can’t put an ad in front of them and have that be something that allows me to help pay for the content creation that’s there.” What we’re seeing actually goes back to some of the original protocols of the internet. The 403 protocol, which was written in the very first version of Netscape, was actually payment required, and you actually have to pay for the content that you’re receiving. Oh, excuse me, I said 403, it’s actually 402. We are working with other leading companies like Coinbase and Stripe in order to say, “How do we make sure that we can allow people who are creating content, people who are doing things online, anyone who’s putting a website up, to say that in exchange for that thousands and thousands and thousands of times more traffic that’s going to come to you, you’re not going to maybe get the advertising revenue that comes from it, but maybe you can get a fraction of a penny every time somebody actually accesses that information.” Where does that fraction of a penny come from? It comes from the fee that people are going to be paying for their AI agents and other systems that are out there, similar to how a Spotify or an Apple Music works today. I like that we’re less than 10 minutes in and we’re already at the 1996 dream of micropayments on the web. We’re going to stick with that for one more turn here. When I said business model, what I was really pushing at was the idea of incentives. So maybe there is some business model for information. You’re going to publish some new information and bots will come and find it and yep, the 402 protocol will come back to life and we’re going to do, I don’t know, crypto micropayments using Stripe powered by Cloudflare. That’s a version of the future that many people have talked about for a long time. The incentives to stand all that up on the web is the thing that I’m worried about, when I say there’s a business model and customers and revenue. If I stand up a website, and I think most of my customers are going to be bots and not people, I might not do that. I might just start a TikTok channel instead, and then monetize my TikTok audience in whatever way I might want to monetize a TikTok audience. That seems like a really big inflection point right now at this second. You mentioned Google, and I’ve asked you about this many times. The incentives to put new information on the web just seem to be in permanent decline. It just doesn’t seem like a good idea any more. On the flip side, the web as an application program, it’s like the absolute apex. Every new app that comes out is a web app, or if it’s a desktop app, it’s just Electron. There’s something happening with the web as an application platform that is incredible, and something happening to the web as an information platform that is devastating. And you’re trying to connect those dots, right? You’re trying to say we can change the incentives over here. What’s a version of the future — maybe it’s microtransactions, maybe it’s not — where the incentives to make the web an information platform are as good as YouTube? You’ve illustrated a tough to reconcile dichotomy that’s happening right now. If you look at things like the publicly accessible data on Wikipedia contributions, it’s down significantly, because people are like, “What’s the incentive to put information on Wikipedia?” Something that, again, people are doing for a lot of different reasons. Back in the day, if you were contributing things to Wikipedia, you knew people were at least reading Wikipedia. Now, the interface through which people consume that information isn’t Wikipedia itself. It’s just reading the answer through whatever answer engine you’re using, whether that’s OpenAI, ChatGPT, or Anthropic Claude, or Grok on X or whatever it is. And that means that the people who are the editors of Wikipedia are saying, “Maybe it doesn’t make as much sense for me to do that.” The flip side of that is, the web as a whole actually had been declining since about 2012. The web grew like crazy in the late ‘90s and through the 2000s. Starting around 2012, you really saw it plateauing and actually decreasing, up until about 2025, where something flipped. Starting in about October of 2025, the various vibe-coding platforms made it easy for anyone to create a website, and so more and more people were creating those applications. And as you said, even your desktop application, your mobile application, increasingly is just a wrapper around what is fundamentally a web application. The growth of the web itself — with really high-quality stuff and a lot more people contributing to it — is faster today than it has been at any time since the early 2000s. That’s the tension between those various things. What’s unique about Cloudflare is that because we sit in front of more than 20 percent of the web, we have the ability to overcome some of the incentives problems. We can very quickly turn something on and say, “Okay, you have to pay a fraction of a penny in order to get access to this information.” And that can kickstart the beginning of what we need. If you don’t have something like that, we face a massive tragedy of the commons problem. Let’s say today I ask my favorite AI agent where I should go to lunch.If I were doing research,