--- title: "Cloudflare at Sixteen Bets on 500,000 New Entrants, Not Five AI Giants" description: "Machines passed people on the web in May, well ahead of forecast; the founders’ letter asks who pays for the load" author: "Frank Hale" published: 2026-09-27T17:00:00Z modified: 2026-09-28T18:19:09Z url: https://rews.cc/a/cloudflare-at-sixteen-bets-on-500-000-new-entrants-not-five--64fe7f language: en tags: ["ai", "automation", "agents", "startups", "economy", "tech"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Cloudflare at Sixteen Bets on 500,000 New Entrants, Not Five AI Giants *Machines passed people on the web in May, well ahead of forecast; the founders’ letter asks who pays for the load* By Frank Hale · September 27, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/cloudflare-at-sixteen-bets-on-500-000-new-entrants-not-five--64fe7f ## In brief - Cloudflare marked its 16th birthday since launching at TechCrunch Disrupt on September 27, 2010, with a founders’ letter on AI - New website growth exploded in mid-2025, driven mainly by “vibe coding” creators rather than AI “slop,” the company says - Automated traffic passed human traffic in May 2026 and could hit 1,000 times human levels in five years if trends hold - Cloudflare is building tools so crawlers fetch only new content and a way for online publishers to be paid when agents use their work Cloudflare turned sixteen this week. The company launched on September 27, 2010, on a stage at TechCrunch Disrupt. Its engineers sat in the audience fixing bugs. There were eight left when the founders walked on. By the time they walked off, the bugs were fixed, and Cloudflare was live in five data centers on three continents. The founders marked the birthday with a letter. It reads the way sixteen feels. The company looks at the world it grew up in and finds itself caught between the past and the future. It sees risk in the change, and it comes out optimistic anyway. What drives both, the letter says, is a recognition that change involves disruption. And the Internet is changing more today than at any point since the company launched. The web itself is growing again. From 2012 through 2025 it plateaued, and by some measures it shrank. In mid-2025 that broke, and new websites arrived in an explosion. The popular account credits AI “slop.” There is some of that, the letter says, but it is not the majority of what Cloudflare sees. What the company sees is a new kind of creator. People with ideas and no coding skills are building with what are called vibe-coding tools, and most of those tools choose Cloudflare’s developer platform as their place to deploy. More than 7 million developers now build there. The letter describes students around the world building apps for real-world problems and startups with new business ideas getting built in record time. Technology at its best, the founders write, lets more people express their creativity. The larger change is who uses the Internet. Increasingly it is a what. Cloudflare had forecast that automated traffic would pass human traffic in the second half of 2027. The rise of agents and AI crawlers pulled that date forward to May of 2026. If current trends continue — which the company says seems, if anything, conservative — automated traffic will run 1,000 times human traffic in just five years. Not because human traffic declines. Because traffic from agents is exploding. For the person using one, an agent is a marvel. Ask it to find a flight, a contractor or a cheaper phone plan and it will read more pages in a minute than you could read in an afternoon, then come back with an answer. It does the legwork, so you do not have to. The legwork is not free. Ask an agent where you should go to lunch and it may survey 1,000 restaurant menus in the area to suggest a single one. That restaurant gets your business. The other 999 shoulder the load of serving the agent and get nothing in return. The letter names the risk a tragedy of the commons: the users who benefit from the agents and their traffic do not bear the cost of the load they put on the system, and so they do not exercise restraint. There is a second risk and it cuts the other way. AI has made it easier than ever to build something. Agents could make it much harder for anyone to find it. Small businesses win customers on emotion and convenience — the deli where the person working the counter remembers your name, the local store that sits on the drive home. An agent does not care who remembers your name, and it is not driving home past the local store. It goes with whatever it has the most information about, and that is usually whoever has been around the longest. As agents handle more commerce, new entrants will find it harder to break in. That, the letter says, is likely to lead to consolidation and a less robust business environment. Cloudflare was a new entrant once. Nobody’s agent would have recommended it, the founders write. People took a chance on it anyway. They want the next new entrants to get the same chance. > Not a future with five AI companies, but one with 500,000, spread around the world. That is what the company says it is playing for — and for an Internet where content creators do not wither away for lack of compensation, where anyone can create, reach a global audience and get paid, and where new entrants with better products can win instead of mega corporations winning by default. Last year’s letter was about what AI was doing to publishers. This year, the founders write, the same shift reaches the restaurant and the deli. What replaces the Internet’s old business model is, in their words, the most interesting question of the next five years. This week the company takes another swing at answering it. Some of the work is for the 999 restaurants. Agents crawl the web the way search engines always have — everything, over and over, whether it has changed or not. Cloudflare’s data suggests more than half of what good bots fetch has not changed since their last visit. The company has been working so that crawlers see more of the web while fetching only what is new, which cuts the load on the sites they crawl. And it is giving anyone who puts content or applications online a way to get paid when agents use what they have built. The company will also announce partnerships this week with companies and organizations that want the same future. The mission, the letter says, is not to build a better Internet but to help build one, and that cannot be done alone. > We’re shipping them for an Internet that still has room for a teenager launching their first app, the deli where they remember your name, and whoever is building the next Cloudflare.