To influence the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and the data economy, Cloudflare acquires Human Native, a Data Marketplace for AIs. This acquisition is intended to create a structured system for professionals who generate new content (including news publishers and individual artists) to take advantage of all their revenue streams by being able to create their own licensing and payment agreements with AI companies for their work.
Cloudflare is Creating a New Deal for Creators in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Cloudflare acquires Human Native in direct response to unsuitable Internet dynamics. Traditional internet pricing models have been historically based on website traffic, with publishers being able to monetize their content through advertising. This structure has become obsolete as AI companies have developed crawlers that are able to harvest any type of content and push it onto the web without having to compensate those who created it.
Human Native technology, easily compared to eBay for AI data, converts unstructured content into useful, high quality data sets that can be licensed/copyrighted for commercial purposes. So far, Cloudflare can provide its publishing customers with the option of deploying tools such as AI Crawl Control to block these commercial bots or, more importantly, to monetize the content creators’ work by using their content to train AI, creating a new revenue stream.
The Protocols Supporting a Machine-Payable Web Vision on a Larger Scale
Human Native serves as an essential component beyond simply creating better paywalls for Cloudflare. Through its x402 Foundation (in collaboration with Coinbase), Cloudflare is laying the protocol foundation for a machine-to-machine micropayment system that allows for direct transactability of machines over the Internet.
In the near future, there’ll be scenarios where AI agents can pay fractions of a cent to read a copyright-protected article or view an image owned by someone else, all automatically, in real time, through transaction settlement on a blockchain. The content license layer provided by the x402 Foundation is critical to the long-term sustainability of this vision for content creators.
