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Cloudflare says that more than half of the traffic passing through its network is no longer human, while requests from AI agents grew by more than 1,700% over the course of a year. The company is offering tools to distinguish between types of bots, control access, and charge for the use of content and services, but acknowledges that pricing and detection models are still experimental.
Cloudflare has launched a closed beta of Monetization Gateway, a layer that enables websites, APIs, and MCP tools to collect usage-based payments from AI agents. The service relies on HTTP 402 and settles payments in USDC on the Base network, with production deployments at Cloudflare AI Gateway, Ceramic.ai, Stocktwits, and API2PDF.