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Matthew Prince

Co-Founder, Co-Chairman & CEO, Cloudflare

Search every verified Matthew Prince interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, has been publicly discussing the impact of AI on the internet's business model and infrastructure. In interviews and a TED talk, he stated that automated traffic has surpassed human traffic on Cloudflare's network, and he projected that agentic traffic could become a thousand times greater than human traffic within five years. He argued that the traditional ad-based model for the internet is "dying" and that AI answer engines are reducing traffic to content creators, which he said is "destroying media." Prince proposed that AI companies should compensate content creators, and he described Cloudflare's plans to block Google from accessing ad-supported or subscription-supported sites by default starting in mid-September, unless publishers opt out. Prince also discussed the broader implications of AI, expressing concern that agentic commerce could consolidate power among large businesses and disadvantage small ones. He noted that some managers at Cloudflare have preferred returning to individual contributor roles as AI agents take on more work. During Cloudflare's Q2 2026 earnings call, the company reported revenue of $696.1 million, a 36% increase year-over-year, and said that for the first time, more than half of traffic on its network was non-human. Prince emphasized that Cloudflare is focused on building infrastructure for AI agents and micropayments rather than competing with hyperscalers on commodity compute.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“We've got to do something that can process micro payments at just incredible scale. So to give you some sense, today Cloudflare handles about half a billion web transactions per second. We think between one and 10% of those will be monetizable through some sort of microtransaction. So that means that you've got roughly 10 million financial transactions per second that you've got to do very, very small. So have to be ”

“We now think that automated traffic, agentic traffic, will be a thousand times as much as human traffic in five years, in just five years. And that's just incredibly remarkable that in a not-so-distant future, not because humans are going to decrease how they use the internet, but because bots are just going to increase so much that humans are really going to just almost be a rounding error online. And the implicatio”

“we found that every single page that OpenAI sees, Google sees three. Four in Microsoft’s case, five in Anthropic's case, 21 or 22 in xAI's case. An enormous advantage that Google has, and they want to hold on to that advantage. In fact, they're playing incredibly dirty. They're saying to content creators, "You can't stop us from training on your content or we will take you out of search." Horrible. Superman, how far ”

“The answer engines are giving the answers and people aren't following the footnotes. And this was 18 months ago. What's happened since, has it gotten better or worse? Do you trust AI more today than you did 18 months ago? The answer is most people do, and as a result, it's actually gotten twice as hard to get traffic to content that's there. You're not following the footnotes anymore. You're actually trusting that AI”

“Starting in mid-September, we're going to treat Google the same way on if you have an ads, if you're a business that's ad supported or subscription supported, then we're going to restrict Google from being able to access your content. You can always opt out... But the defaults for us starting in mid-September are going to be that we are going to block Google by default. And I would imagine that a bunch of the largest”

“We now see that automated traffic has passed human traffic for the first time in the history of the internet. And I think that really does just show how fast this is progressing and how fast the derivative is changing where the slope of the line is getting steeper. If you just fast forward 5 years from now, we estimate now that automated traffic online will be a thousand times what human traffic is.”

Other executives at Cloudflare

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