Cloudflare, the company that quietly powers a large part of the internet, is now making a louder play in the world of AI infrastructure. From AI agents and developer tools to protocol-level governance, it aims to be the invisible backbone for builders, regardless of whether they’re Fortune 500 companies or independent coders.
In an exclusive interview with AIM, Dane Knecht, CTO of Cloudflare, told AIM that the ecosystem is still catching up. “You do need a whole new set of tooling around it,” he said, referring to the emerging Model Context Protocol (MCP). “We are kind of recreating things that we built in the past. Just, you know, for a new domain.”
And when that domain buckles, Cloudflare feels the tremor first.
Evolving the Web With MCPs and AI Agents
MCPs are being hailed as the next big interface layer between AI models and real-world software. When asked about MCPs, Knecht explained that the internet, or web, contains vast amounts of unstructured data and numerous applications with diverse APIs. APIs serve as programmatic interfaces for interacting with these applications.
AI requires a standardised language to communicate with them, enabling consistent retrieval of information and control. MCP is an early protocol that acts as a universal translator, establishing standard methods for AI models to access applications, retrieve information, and issue commands to perform actions.
New protocols often repeat history. “Some people would say MCP is reinventing APIs,” Knecht acknowledged.
But the rush to scale has sidelined caution. “A lot of companies have kind of thrown out the best practices around security just to move fast,” he said, just like the recent case of Supabase MCP, which potentially leaked the entire SQL database.
“They’ve said, you know, let’s move fast and not get left behind. Even if that means companies have more risk, I don’t think that’s a good thing,” Knecht noted.
He argued that the value is genuine, pointing out that if it weren’t valuable, people wouldn’t be using it. The protocol is also evolving rapidly, incorporating encryption and authentication features based on user feedback.
But for developers to build responsibly, the supporting scaffolding still needs to catch up. He explained that tooling is essential for observability, auditing, security, and data loss prevention. A new Web Application Firewall (WAF) for the protocol is also needed. Additionally, data governance is required for the data and its flow.
When asked about Cloudflare’s stance on helping developers build AI agents, Knecht said to AIM, “Cloudflare’s built kind of the perfect infrastructure for that.”
He added that Cloudflare offers compute primitives, providing durable objects on the edge that integrate context, memory for inference, compute, and internet connectivity. This allows for fast and secure agent development.
AI for Everyone, Even the Solo Dev
Cloudflare believes it has equipped developers with the right tools to streamline their workflow, allowing them to focus on writing code while the platform handles the complexities of deployment, scalability, and security.
By abstracting away the traditional burdens of managing infrastructure, the company aims to simplify the process of deploying applications globally with minimal overhead.
To deepen adoption, Cloudflare is focused on improving accessibility through better tooling, comprehensive documentation, and community-driven resources.
Knecht said that the company actively engages with developers across various platforms, including Discord, Twitter, and Reddit, as well as in-person at global hackathons. Its presence in Bangalore reflects a commitment to supporting and growing local developer communities by offering on-the-ground resources and education.
What Happens When Cloudflare Breaks
Cloudflare’s reach is both a strength and a risk. When the internet fails, the likelihood is high that Cloudflare’s infrastructure is implicated.
“It’s a bad day when we let down our customers and we let down all the users,” said Knecht. “That’s something that we take very seriously.”
He emphasises remediation, transparency, and learning as its core priorities. It quickly attempts to gather facts and information, regardless of how it might impact their image, and communicates what happened through their blog.
Cloudflare’s teams “take it very personally when we do let down our customers,” he adds. The aim is not only to fix problems, but also to prevent their recurrence.
Not an Enemy of AI
One of Cloudflare’s recent decisions was to block crawlers from AI models, such as ChatGPT and Perplexity. But according to Knecht, this isn’t about taking sides.
“In order for AI to survive, it needs great content,” Knecht said. “But in order for that to work, they do need to be compensated, and they do need to be acknowledged for those contributions.”
Rather than make the call themselves, Cloudflare is building guardrails. “We’re trying to help facilitate that conversation between the publishers and the content creators and the AI models,” he observed.
Knecht indicates that even AI companies desire a fair competitive environment. He mentions that these companies prefer not to bear the sole cost of content creation and would rather support a system that promotes equal opportunities for all players.
Cloudflare’s infrastructure ambitions go beyond faster websites and DDoS protection. It’s about standardising a messy AI agent layer, making tooling accessible to indie developers, safeguarding content creators’ rights, and being honest when things break.
The post Cloudflare Wants to Power AI, Without Breaking the Internet appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.
