Cloudflare acquires Human Native to build new payment model for AI training data

Cloudflare is acquiring British startup Human Native to create a new payment system for AI training data. The company runs a marketplace for AI training data and converts multimedia content into structured, licensable datasets.

The move addresses a growing problem: AI crawlers scrape the web on a massive scale without paying website operators. Instead of letting AI companies grab content for free, publishers could make their data available through an index and get paid for it.

Cloudflare has already been developing tools like "AI Crawl Control" and "Pay Per Crawl" that let website operators control who can use their content for AI training. The company also co-founded the x402 Foundation with Coinbase to enable automatic machine-to-machine payments. Cloudflare runs its own AI platform and recently expanded it by acquiring Replicate.