Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says AI agents need \u201ca face\u201d online. New tools aim to give them identity and payment limits.<\/p>\n
AI agents, software that can browse websites, query systems and make purchases without a human clicking anything, are becoming a more regular part of how business happens online. Cloudflare says the internet isn\u2019t built to handle that shift yet, and it\u2019s launching new tools aimed at fixing it.<\/p>\n
The company has announced Cloudflare Wallets and cloudflare.pay, designed to give AI agents deployed on Cloudflare\u2019s infrastructure a stable, verifiable identity and a way to spend money online within limits set by whoever owns them.<\/p>\n
Cloudflare co-founder and chief executive Matthew Prince framed the problem as one of trust. \u201cThe Internet is shifting from human-driven browsing to agent-driven commerce, and the infrastructure needs to keep up,\u201d Prince said. \u201cWhen an agent shows up at your door, you need to know who sent it. Cloudflare can give agents a face, a link to the human or organisation that owns them, so that trust, accountability, and real commerce can follow. It\u2019s the identity and payment infrastructure the agentic web needs to function.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Cloudflare, businesses currently have no reliable way to tell whether an AI agent visiting their site to make a purchase or sign up for a free trial is acting on behalf of a genuine customer, or is a bad actor exploiting the system. Existing bot-detection tools were largely built to manage search engine crawlers, not agents that transact on a person\u2019s behalf. That\u2019s left businesses choosing between locking systems down heavily or accepting the risk, an approach Cloudflare argues doesn\u2019t hold up at scale.<\/p>\n
Under the new system, Cloudflare accounts will get a unique web address that functions as a stable identifier. Account holders will be able to extend that identity to specific agents they deploy, so a business receiving a request from an agent can see exactly who authorised it.<\/p>\n
Alongside identity, Cloudflare is introducing an \u201cAccount Wallet,\u201d which acts as a central balance capable of receiving, holding and managing stablecoins. From there, users can assign \u201cVirtual Wallets\u201d to individual agents for online spending. Those Virtual Wallets come with built-in guardrails, account holders can set a spending cap, restrict spending to an approved list of merchants, and cap the maximum size of any single transaction the agent can make on its own.<\/p>\n
Combined with Cloudflare\u2019s existing Monetisation Gateway, the company says Wallets and identity tools are intended to complete a two-sided market for agent-driven payments, covering both the agents making purchases and the businesses receiving them.<\/p>\n
Reservation of Cloudflare Wallet handles has opened. Full wallet functionality, including moving funds in and out and issuing Virtual Wallets to individual agents, is expected to roll out in the coming months.<\/p>\n
For now, this remains early-stage infrastructure rather than something most small businesses will need to act on immediately. But as AI agents take on a bigger role in browsing, comparing and buying on people\u2019s behalf, tools like this point to where identity verification and fraud prevention for online businesses may be heading.<\/p>\n
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Yajush writes for Dynamic Business and previously covered business news at Reuters.<\/p>\n
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