Cloudflare developer base hits 10 million, driven by AI agent growth
Cloudflare reports a 35% quarterly surge in developers, linking the expansion to a massive rise in AI agent traffic on its network.
Key points
- Cloudflare’s active developer count reached 10 million, up from 7.4 million last quarter.
- Daily requests from AI agents on the network grew by more than 1,700% over the past year.
- The company states that non-human traffic now accounts for more than half of all internet traffic.
Cloudflare announced on Tuesday that its platform now supports more than 10 million developers, marking a significant expansion in its user base. The company reported this figure in a press release, noting that the count rose from 7.4 million just three months prior. This represents a growth rate of approximately 35% in a single quarter, highlighting rapid adoption among engineering teams.
The company attributes this surge largely to the integration of artificial intelligence agents into development workflows. According to Cloudflare, developers are increasingly using AI tools to write code and build applications at accelerated speeds. These new applications are designed to serve not only human users but also autonomous agents, shifting the traditional software lifecycle.
Context and Background
Rita Kozlov, Cloudflare’s vice president of product management, described this shift as an expansion of the software lifecycle. She stated that the industry is moving from developers building for people to a model where both developers and agents build for people and agents. This evolution reflects a broader trend in how software is created and consumed in the modern digital ecosystem.
Cloudflare’s developer business originated nearly a decade ago with the launch of Workers, its serverless computing platform. Unlike traditional virtual machines or containers, Workers executes code in lightweight isolates. Since then, the company has layered additional services onto this foundation, including storage, databases, AI models, media processing, real-time services, and monitoring tools.
Who Is Affected
The release highlighted specific products driving this engagement, including Workers AI, Workers KV, AI Gateway, Durable Objects, D1, and R2. Cloudflare has already utilized its Workers platform to run a browser specifically designed for AI agents, demonstrating the practical application of these services for non-human traffic.
Data from a Cloudflare blog post indicates that daily requests from AI agents on its network grew by more than 1,700% over the last year. The company noted that this year, for the first time, more than half of all internet traffic was generated by non-human sources. This aligns with previous statements from Cloudflare leadership regarding the dominance of bot traffic.
In July, Cloudflare stated that the web is now primarily composed of bots. In September, chief executive Matthew Prince told The Verge that bot traffic could eventually reach 1,000 times the volume of human traffic. The network currently spans more than 340 cities in over 130 countries, connecting with 13,888 networks and offering 590 terabits per second of external capacity.
Dane Knecht, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, emphasized that developers no longer need to compromise between speed, scale, and security. However, the press release did not disclose revenue figures for the developer business or specify how many of the 10 million developers are paying customers.
What should you do?
Security and technology professionals should monitor their own network traffic for similar patterns of non-human activity. As AI agent traffic grows, distinguishing between legitimate automated tasks and malicious bots becomes increasingly complex. Organizations should review their access logs to identify unexpected spikes in request volumes that may indicate unauthorized agent activity.
What to do and how to stay safe: Cloudflare
- Review application logs to identify traffic patterns consistent with AI agents or automated scripts.
- Verify that API endpoints are protected against excessive automated requests using rate limiting.
- Ensure that authentication mechanisms distinguish between human users and automated agents.
- Monitor for unusual data exfiltration patterns that may result from automated scraping tools.
Step-by-step guide: Mobile Device Security: How to Protect Data Beyond Passwords
General security guidance from the Threat Times newsroom. It is not confirmed advice from the organisations named in this story.
Frequently asked questions
How many developers are now using Cloudflare?
Cloudflare reported that more than 10 million developers are building on its platform as of Tuesday.
What is the primary driver for this growth?
The company tied the growth to the increasing use of AI agents in software development and deployment.
How much has AI agent traffic grown on Cloudflare's network?
Daily requests from AI agents grew by more than 1,700% over the past year.
