Cloudflare, the San Francisco-based cybersecurity and internet infrastructure giant, has acquired Human Native, a UK-based AI data marketplace.
The deal aims to empower content creators with control over their data in the generative AI era, addressing rising tensions around web scraping and bot traffic.
Human Native specializes in converting unstructured multimedia videos, articles, and more into licensed, searchable datasets for AI training. Founded to treat data as a valuable asset rather than scrapable fodder, the company helps developers build superior models.
One UK video AI firm scrapped its prior training data after Human Native’s licensed sources delivered better results, highlighting the quality edge of ethical data sourcing.
For decades, the open web thrived on a simple bargain: creators produce content, platforms like search engines drive traffic, and ads or subscriptions monetize it. But AI bots now overwhelm sites, with crawl-to-referral ratios hitting tens of thousands to one. Cloudflare’s blog post notes uncertainty over how multipurpose crawlers use accessed content, straining creators from news outlets to tech firms.
Cloudflare’s response includes AI Crawl Control and Pay Per Crawl tools, letting site owners block bots, demand payments, or optimize for inclusion in AI datasets. “Content owners should decide,” the company states. Human Native’s integration accelerates this vision, blending licensed data with Cloudflare’s infrastructure.
Post-acquisition, Cloudflare will enhance its AI Index, a pub/sub system where sites push real-time content updates to subscribers, bypassing inefficient crawls riddled with spam or duplicates. This promises cleaner data for foundation models and agents.
Looking ahead, Cloudflare eyes x402, a new protocol via the x402 Foundation (with Coinbase), for seamless machine-to-machine payments. Traditional web payments suit humans; x402 enables automated transactions between AI systems and content providers, fostering sustainable models.
The acquisition underscores Cloudflare’s pivot toward AI infrastructure. CEO Matthew Prince emphasized building “better AI on better data, with fair control for creators.” Human Native’s team joins to expand these tools, potentially transforming how publishers monetize in an AI-dominated web.
As bot traffic surges, this move signals a broader shift: from open scraping to structured, compensated data flows. Full details are in Cloudflare’s announcement.
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