The CLOUDFLARE logo placed outside company housing on January 20, 2025, on the opening day of the 55th World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
Eve Herman | Reuters
cloudflare The company announced Thursday that it will acquire artificial intelligence data marketplace Human Native to expand its development of deals between AI developers and content creators.
“Content creators deserve full control over their work, whether they want to write it for humans or optimize it for AI,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in a release announcing the news.
The internet infrastructure company said the acquisition will help AI developers build tools to “find, access, and buy trusted, high-quality data through fair and transparent channels.”
The deal price was not specified in the press release, and a Cloudflare spokesperson declined to provide further details.
Prince said the acquisition will help Cloudflare accelerate the development of a new system that pays creators for the content that AI developers use to train their models.
British startup Human Native manages these deals.
“This acquisition is aimed at building the tools needed to protect the lifespan of the open Internet,” Prince said in the release.
Prince told CNBC’s “Mad Money” in August that the company’s new mission is evolving to reimagine the monetization of content on the internet.
“I think this is the fourth act for Cloudflare, because we’re helping make sure content creators get paid and we’re helping the web’s business models continue to survive and evolve,” he told Cramer.
Last summer, Cloudflare announced its AI crawl control product, giving customers a way to limit and monetize “AI crawlers” (the nickname for bots that collect data from across the web to train large-scale language models) on their sites.
Thanks to Cloudflare’s cybersecurity products, the stock has benefited from AI trading, with the stock up more than 60% in the last year.
