Can Cloudflare save the web from AI?

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Nilay Patel (0:44)

Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This episode is part of a two-part series on the future of business. Today, I'm talking with Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare. Cloudflare is one of the most important infrastructure companies in the world. It protects all kinds of apps and services from bad actors on the internet, basically making it possible to operate a business online. Matthew last joined us in the show about two and a half years ago, but what we thought then was a wild pivot point for the internet. But now, because of AI, it turns out things are even wilder, and Matthew and Cloudflare are right at the center of it. Cloudflare found in June that bots now make up more than half of the internet traffic, a number that just keeps going up as more and more AI companies scrape more and more of the web, and now as more and more people send AI agents out to do things for them on the web. Cloudflare sits between websites and all those AI tools, and allows website owners some level of control. They can block all those tools, allow them, or as you'll hear Matthew describe, potentially only allow those that pay money for access. So Matthew and I talked about how to control all those bots, what kind of mess they're making of the web, and what kinds of information might be more valuable in the future as some of these payment schemes come into focus. You'll hear me ask pretty directly if some of the outcomes he's describing are actually good. Matthew is a thoughtful guy, and his answer is something I'm still thinking about well after we had this conversation. Matthew is also the center of another important AI debate. Earlier this year, Cloudflare laid off more than a thousand people, 20% of the company. And Matthew wrote an op-ed about that decision, which ran in the Wall Street Journal under the headline, How I choose which Cloudflare employees to replace with AI.

That is pure Decoder Bay. AI, big controversial decisions, and org charts all in one. So obviously, we talked about that decision in detail, and what it might mean for how companies are structured in the future. One last thing before we get started, you can subscribe to Decoder on YouTube, where we put out new episodes every Monday and Thursday. Okay, Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare. Here we go.

Matthew Prince, you're the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. Welcome back to Decoder.

Matthew Prince (2:56)

Thanks for having me.

Nilay Patel (2:57)

All right. I'm really excited to talk to you again. It's been about two years since you're on the show. I was just looking back over that episode, and I said something to you like, it's a momentous time for the internet, and I was not even close. It's now an even more momentous.

It's time for the internet. You are at the forefront of rebooting how companies work with AI. That is the most Decoder bait of all time. I want to talk about bots and the internet and publishers and Google and all the things that you are in the middle of. But let's start at the very beginning. Cloudflare is a complicated, important company. The last time I went on the show, you summed it up. You said Cloudflare is a service that makes the internet faster and protects it from bad guys. Is that still how you would describe what Cloudflare does?

Matthew Prince (3:33)

It's usually when I'm trying to answer a question at a cocktail party, and I don't want to talk to the person anymore.

What I would say if I actually was interested in talking to the person more is, Cloudflare is trying to rebuild the internet the way it should have been built from the beginning if we knew how important it was going to be. We run a giant network. We're in over 350 cities worldwide, literally thousands of data centers. In all those places, we have equipment running. Then we do a handful of things. We stop if you're trying to put an application or content online, we make sure that it's safe. If you're a person or an employee who's online, we make sure that wherever you go online is safe. We help give people the ability to write applications that can scale to an entire Internet audience and run on the infrastructure that we have. That's the fastest growing part of our business. I think the thing that we've recently started to think about is the business model of the Internet is changing dramatically.