Cloudflare for AI: Bringing security and governance to AI adoption
AI is quickly moving from experimental to operational across businesses — powering automated agents, improving search, and making knowledge more accessible. But as organizations race to adopt these technologies, the security and privacy boundaries around them are becoming harder to define. Cloudflare for AI is the company's response: a suite of tools designed to help businesses, developers, and content creators deploy AI at scale with security built in from the start.
Cloudflare for AI isn't just a bundling of existing features. It's also a signal that the company's future development roadmap will prioritize AI-related security and infrastructure needs. For those building on Cloudflare, the offering spans the full lifecycle of AI applications, from development to production traffic management.
For developers: building and protecting AI applications
Developers building AI applications — whether fully custom or vendor-hosted — get access to Cloudflare's deployment, storage, and security tooling. Workers AI and the new AI Agents SDK support scalable development and deployment across Cloudflare's network, keeping inference close to users for lower latency and better performance. For training data, Cloudflare R2 offers storage with zero egress fees, a cost advantage when working with large datasets.
The platform also supports the primitives needed for AI agents: real-time communications, state persistence, long-running task execution, and scheduled repetition. Cloudflare's composable architecture gives developers the building blocks to create sophisticated agent-based applications.
Once an application is live, AI Gateway provides visibility into cost, usage, latency, and overall performance — regardless of where the application is hosted. For security, Firewall for AI adds a layer of protection by automatically checking every prompt for injection attempts and preventing personally identifiable information (PII) from being submitted to the application. Extraction filtering for PII is planned as a forthcoming capability.
For security teams: control, visibility, and protection
Security teams now face a dual challenge: securing internal employee use of AI applications while also protecting externally-facing AI services the business operates. Proper handling of PII has become a top concern for CISOs.
Discovery is the first step. Firewall for AI's discovery capability identifies AI applications in use across the organization without requiring time-consuming surveys. Once applications are known, Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) ensures only authorized employees can reach the right applications, while Firewall for AI enforces PII submission and extraction rules even for authorized users.
Malicious actors are targeting AI applications with novel attack vectors since these systems are often connected to internal data stores. Firewall for AI, combined with Cloudflare's broader Application Security portfolio, addresses many of the threats cited in the OWASP Top 10 for LLM applications, including prompt injection, sensitive information disclosure, and improper output handling.
For content safety, Llama Guard is integrated into both AI Gateway and Firewall for AI. This integration checks both input and output for toxicity and enforces topic and sentiment rules aligned with internal business policy.
For content creators: visibility and control over AI crawlers
Content creators face increasing pressure as LLMs generate high-quality text, images, and video. Cloudflare's AI Independence initiative gives creators tools to safeguard their work. AI Crawl Control (formerly AI Audit) provides visibility into which AI platforms are crawling a site, what they retrieve, and when — with ongoing classification of new crawler vendors as they appear.
When AI crawlers disregard robots.txt or are otherwise unwanted, site owners can block them outright. Self-serve Cloudflare customers get a one-click protection option, while larger enterprises can use Bot Management to build fine-tuned rules targeting individual bots and creating custom filters.
Security as a foundation for AI's future
Cloudflare for AI aims to make secure AI deployment straightforward whether you're already on Cloudflare or just evaluating options for AI security. The suite reflects a simple premise: for AI applications to succeed at scale, they must be reliable, observable, and safe to use.
