Cloudflare Shares Rise 5.9% on AI Tools
Cloudflare Inc (NYSE: NET) announced the launch of two new offerings, Cloudflare Wallets and cloudflare.pay, designed to give artificial‑intelligence agents a stable identity and the ability to execute secure online purchases within limits set by their human owners. Each AI agent receives a unique web address that serves as a stable identifier, which businesses can use to verify who authorized a transaction. The Cloudflare Account Wallet acts as a central balance that can receive, hold, and manage stablecoins, while Virtual Wallets can be assigned to individual agents with built‑in guardrails such as spending caps, approved merchant lists, and maximum transaction sizes. The company said the wallet handle reservation opened on Tuesday, and full wallet functionality—including on‑ramping, off‑ramping, and issuance of Virtual Wallets—will be rolled out over the coming months. Matthew Prince, co‑founder and CEO of Cloudflare, stated, “When 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 organization that owns them—so that trust, accountability, and real commerce can follow.” The announcement targets what Cloudflare describes as a fundamental infrastructure gap as the internet shifts from human‑driven browsing to agent‑driven commerce, noting that existing bot‑detection tools were built for search crawlers rather than transaction‑making agents. Following the news, Cloudflare’s share price jumped 5.9% on the day, contributing to an overall rise of about 7% in the stock.