Cloudflare has acquired Human Native, a UK-based startup it describes as building infrastructure to help creators and AI developers discover, price, and license content for AI use.
Cloudflare did not disclose financial terms, but positioned the deal as a step toward “a new economic model” for the AI internet, where content owners can choose control, compensation, and credit for AI usage.
Cloudflare’s crawl-control roadmap
The acquisition plugs into a product arc Cloudflare has been building around AI crawling and licensing. In July 2025, Cloudflare launched “Content Independence Day” and introduced Pay Per Crawl, framing it as a way for site owners to allow, charge, or block AI crawlers.
In August 2025, it followed with AI Crawl Control, aimed at letting publishers manage how different AI bots access their content. In September 2025, Cloudflare also announced a private beta of an AI Index designed to make content “discoverable” to AI builders under clearer compensation terms.
Blocking, controls and paid access
Separately, at WIRED’s Big Interview event in San Francisco, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said Cloudflare has blocked 416 billion AI bot requests for its customers since July 1, 2025, part of the company’s efforts to give publishers more control over training data access.
The company has also described default-blocking and bot controls as a way to reduce uncontrolled crawling while creating room for paid access models.
Human Native’s marketplace model
Human Native’s CEO, James Smith, said the goal is to get generative AI “out of its Napster era,” and Cloudflare’s announcement said Human Native’s tooling helps transform unstructured media into AI-ready datasets under licensing frameworks.
Human Native says it is “a data marketplace providing AI developers with easy access to fully licensed, ready-to-use data,” positioning licensing as a standardized path rather than one-off arrangements.
Legal backdrop and licensing push
The timing also lands in a market shaped by copyright disputes and licensing deals. A federal judge has allowed core claims to proceed in a consolidated news-publisher lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, underscoring the legal exposure around training and output that resembles protected text.
OpenAI has publicly contested parts of The New York Times’ case in its own materials, highlighting how central “permission vs. fair use” has become to the sector’s operating posture.
Cloudflare said the Human Native acquisition is meant to accelerate tools that let AI developers “find, access, and purchase” high-quality licensed data through “fair and transparent channels,” as it pushes for a new economic model for content in the AI era.