Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for AI Agents

(blog.cloudflare.com)

76 points | by farhadhf 7 hours ago

15 comments

  • Hackbraten 3 hours ago
    Cloudflare: let's give the bots their own accounts so they can scrape harder.

    Also Cloudflare: let's send normal humans who are trying to go about their daily lives into endless Turnstile spinner loops with absolutely zero recourse, grievance, or support infrastructure.

    • jwr 3 hours ago
      I had similar thoughts: "let's convince everyone to outsource the decision on who can access their websites to us, because BOTS BOTS BOTS" and "let's make life easier for bots to do things".
      • moritzruth 3 hours ago
        First you spread the disease, then you sell the cure.
        • deadbabe 1 hour ago
          I think this is more of a “keep friends close but enemies closer” type thing.
      • IncreasePosts 7 minutes ago
        I'm sure they don't want humans to have that experience - the issue is that the human behavior looks very bot-like. This is usually only experienced by people whose setup is perculiar
        • isodev 2 hours ago
          But think of the shareholders
          • deadbabe 2 hours ago
            Anyone can be a shareholder.
            • horacemorace 1 hour ago
              Said the rich swe, fully oblivious of many who struggle to feed their own children.
              • copperx 1 hour ago
                I thought there were no rich swes anymore?
                • deadbabe 1 hour ago
                  Cloudflare is in the S&P500. If you have a 401k diversified in broad market indexes then most likely… you are a shareholder.
                  • Denzel 1 hour ago
                    About half of US households don’t have any retirement at all. Making their point that “shareholders” are a distinct class separate from the whole of the population.
                    • theplumber 12 minutes ago
                      This sounds like Elon’s IPO…I give you 0.000000000009% of my company for your whole savings account. Now have a part of the pie!
                      • tough 45 minutes ago
                        and sitll the US seems to be one of the biggest markets educated on "being a shareholder" im sure Europe has smaller percentage of them.
                        • georgemcbay 36 minutes ago
                          > About half of US households don’t have any retirement at all.

                          ...and the top 10% by wealth own 90% of the stock market.

                          So even among the half that do have retirement savings in 401ks and the like it is on average very little compared to how much the truly wealthy have invested.

                      • skinfaxi 1 hour ago
                        That's unnecessarily presumptuous.
                  • j45 1 hour ago
                    It's a clean way to charge AI to read content too.
                  • simonw 1 hour ago
                    Looks like Cloudflare still haven't shipped the most valuable possible feature for Cloudflare Workers though: hard billing caps.

                    I want to set a cap of $100/month and know, for sure, that if something untoward happens my apps will all stop serving traffic rather than me getting hit with a bill for $1000s.

                    The safest way to use Workers is on the free tier, which will shut off after 100,000 requests/day: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing/#...

                    • sofixa 36 minutes ago
                      Never going to happen at such a platform.

                      They prefer waiving the occasional DDoS / misconfiguration over giving their customers to cause outages with something so trivially forgotten about and so disconnected from the tech and actual platform.

                    • simonw 2 hours ago
                      Hot damn...

                      > Any agent can now run wrangler deploy --temporary and deploy a Worker to Cloudflare. This temporary deployment stays live for 60 minutes, during which time you can claim the temporary account, making it permanently your own. If you don't, it expires on its own.

                      Forget about agents, Cloudflare just provided free scratch deployments - ephemeral for 60 minutes - for anyone.

                      This is going to be amazing for things like PR previews and code review. Being able to deploy a preview to a working URL for free is a huge reduction in friction.

                      I hope it doesn't get abused so much that they turn it off again.

                      • simonw 2 hours ago
                        I just tried this out:

                          % npx wrangler deploy --temporary
                          
                            wrangler 4.103.0
                          ────────────────────
                           You must accept Cloudflare's Terms of Service (https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/) and Privacy Policy (https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/) in order to continue. By typing "yes", you agree to these terms. Type "yes" to continue. … yes
                          Solving proof-of-work challenge…
                          Temporary account ready:
                           Account: Educated Celery (created)
                           Claim within: 60 minutes
                           Claim URL: https://dash.cloudflare.com/claim-preview?claimToken=CAVe7LzWiGad-redacted
                          Total Upload: 13.79 KiB / gzip: 4.12 KiB
                          Uploaded cloudflare-redirect-resolver (2.27 sec)
                          Deployed cloudflare-redirect-resolver triggers (0.50 sec)
                            https://cloudflare-redirect-resolver.educated-celery.workers.dev
                          Current Version ID: 5c12da7f-2749-4ccc-a8f6-79b85da98d10
                        
                        I'm amused that it made me accept the terms and conditions without any indication of who I am, but it did work - https://cloudflare-redirect-resolver.educated-celery.workers... will be live for the next 59 minutes.
                        • bstsb 1 hour ago
                          > I'm amused that it made me accept the terms and conditions without any indication of who I am

                          as far as i’m aware, that’s fully binding and often an accepted practise - take Minecraft’s server software, where you must accept the EULA with a text flag before running

                          • avipars 1 hour ago
                            You might want to claim the link or remove it
                        • aleksiy123 1 hour ago
                          Wasn’t this case pretty much before?

                          The limits are 100 workers on free and 500 on paid.

                          And if need more then you can always go their platform which supports tenancy.

                          As long as you have a cronjob or similar to clean up the cost of having per PR preview is pretty much zero.

                          • tough 44 minutes ago
                            unless you have 500 PR's a day =)

                            On the other hand, we already use regular CF builds for frontend previews, but that doesnt solve a fullstack PR preview much

                          • aplomb1026 1 hour ago
                            [flagged]
                          • derektank 3 hours ago
                            Would love to know more about how Cloudflare plans to prevent abuse of ephemeral infrastructure to host malicious content. From elsewhere in their documentation, “Cloudflare limits how quickly you can create temporary preview accounts. If the Wrangler CLI cannot create an account because too many temporary preview accounts were requested too quickly, wait before retrying or authenticate the CLI with a permanent Cloudflare account,” and “Cloudflare applies additional abuse prevention checks to temporary preview accounts.”[1] This is a bit vague though. Creating a new account has never been a huge hurdle to overcome but this seems to reduce the barrier to entry even more.

                            [1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/claim-dep...

                            • gwittel 44 minutes ago
                              Given how little they do now to stop malicious content hosted behind/by Cloudflare, the bare minimum if anything.
                              • rdtsc 3 hours ago
                                > Would love to know more about how Cloudflare plans to prevent abuse of ephemeral infrastructure to host malicious content

                                If it helps laugh DDoS attacks they would be incentivized to do the exact opposite. They can charge more for “protection” then.

                              • jsyang00 2 hours ago
                                > Make snail-game in Cloudflare Worker in TypeScript and deploy it using wrangler, don't ask me questions, do the best you can

                                https://snail-game.solstice-barometer.workers.dev/

                                pretty cool.

                                • mahirsaid 38 minutes ago
                                  This falls Within my predictions of how the AI playing field is become more leveled, in terms with human digital activity. Soon it wouldn't be so what you can do with the computer but what the agent can do BETTER. We are already there for the most part. These are the early steps of full re-genitive self hosting, fully capable AI the is far more advanced then asking it to solve a 2 + 2 question.

                                  The article worded it perfectly; friction-less "efforts"

                                  • anilgulecha 3 hours ago
                                    If eastdakota/jgc are here.

                                    - simply expose containers to the world directly - without having to go via workers.

                                    - You have other amazing parts of the stack anyway (D1, durable objects, a great object store). These aren't considered "lockin".

                                    - workers is "lockin" - not similar enough to lambda/cloud functions and so becomes CF specific.

                                    Not having a simple container based compute piece has made me hesitate in taking up CF. (Fly or firebase won out)

                                    • jgrahamc 2 hours ago
                                      I am here but I retired from being CTO of Cloudflare in March 2025 [1] and the current CTO is Dane Knecht (dknecht here). What advantage does decoupling Cloudflare Containers from Cloudflare Workers have?

                                      [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/three-chapters-at-cloudflare-pro...

                                      • htrp 2 hours ago
                                        quick piece of feedback, the workers architecture is a little bit annoying when converting from Lambda but hooking up to cloudflare MCP solves 90% of the issues
                                        • tailscaler2026 1 hour ago
                                          there's absolutely nothing positive we want to encourage copying from AWS's architectural approach to anything.
                                    • unix1 1 hour ago
                                      > simply expose containers to the world directly - without having to go via workers.

                                      I run workers and containers and am curious what you mean. Do you have specific use cases in mind outside of the worker invocation model? If so, I'm curious what you'd want to run on Cloudflare. Otherwise, workers don't have to be much of a "lockin" if treated as a thin layer, more like configuration.

                                      > You have other amazing parts of the stack anyway (D1, durable objects, a great object store).

                                      Instead, if you mean accessing these resources from containers, it's a bit clunky [0] but it's there - you should be able to access worker bindings from containers through those outbound handlers.

                                      [0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/containers/platform-detail...

                                      • sofixa 34 minutes ago
                                        Not the OP, but for me it's a simple matter of not wanting to use typescript and the whole swamp on fire that is NPM.
                                      • yodon 3 hours ago
                                        >Not having a simple container based compute piece made me hesitate in taking up CF

                                        Agreed. I wish CF had something like Azure's new fast-starting Express containers.

                                        • ndjdjxixjenej 3 hours ago
                                          [dead]
                                        • piterrro 1 hour ago
                                          Lets keep in mind this is cloudflare workers runtime - it only makes sense to deploy small things there, maybe static sites. Unless the agent creates something for cf workers from scratch, asking it to „now deploy to cloudflare” will fail so bad.

                                          This would only work if they would provision docker image deployment, similar to google cloud run, but the still, everything serveless has its own caveats…

                                          • simonw 59 minutes ago
                                            > Unless the agent creates something for cf workers from scratch

                                            The latest models appear to know CF Workers inside out and are very capable of doing that if you ask them to.

                                            Here's my GPT-5.5 xhigh + Codex Desktop transcript building one just now: https://gist.github.com/simonw/264bd6b8a39fc34c91c9c867454c6... - code here: https://github.com/simonw/cloudflare-redirect-resolver

                                            • piterrro 19 minutes ago
                                              I didnt say LLMs dont know cf workers, I meant that the cf workers runtime is kind of unique and you cannot push there any code without making it cf workers ready in the first place. If you know what youre doing it should be one time step to connect your hono app to cf workers (so not a huge effort) but still its not like tou can run anything there
                                            • kentonv 1 hour ago
                                              > it only makes sense to deploy small things there

                                              What makes you say that?

                                              • piterrro 23 minutes ago
                                                I’m running entire leadjobs.dev on cloudflare workers and its kind of unreliable for the traffic it gets - around 100 visitors/day. There are some weird errors in d1 from time to time which i cannot debug since its all black box. Also latencies are greater than I would expect, especially, again for d1. Overall its great value for money to get a globally available, low latency service - but I would think twice before going all in. As a sidenote, I expected that, thus the architecture of the service is build in a way that it abstracts the cf runtime and I can switch to any other infra, be it dedicated or another cloud, in a matter of a day
                                            • conception 3 hours ago
                                              I know no one is writing copy anymore but i wish they tried to edit it a bit so it wasn’t so glaringly obvious. It just sours the product when it seems like so little effort was put into the message. And it’s not even hard - just change the prompt used!
                                            • aniviacat 3 hours ago
                                              Wouldn't it make more sense to merge the temporary account into an existing one, instead of claiming it as a new account?

                                              This could lead to people having a large amount of separate accounts.

                                              • kylecazar 3 hours ago
                                                I assumed that's how it works if you sign in before claiming the account?

                                                It says to claim you can either sign up or sign in.

                                              • 827a 3 hours ago
                                                Correct me if I'm wrong, but does Cloudflare still not have a "Create Account" button on the account listing page? I think you still have to sign up from scratch doing plus-code email tricks, then invite your original email address as an admin, juggling multiple accounts. They should consider fixing that first.
                                                • quinncom 2 hours ago
                                                  If I want to onboard a client to Cloudflare, I have to ask them to create an account and then invite me, which is a lot of friction for non-technical people.

                                                  A “create account” button accessible to me would be so much better. Then, I create the account and invite the client to join as owner.

                                                  • frogperson 1 hour ago
                                                    Cloudflare makes it really hard to spend money. I constantly have to talk to someone in sales to enable some feature after rounds of negotiating on price. I think they would have way more customers, spending much more money, if they just offered transparent pricing, and fully on-demand services.
                                                  • variety8675 3 hours ago
                                                    • soared 3 hours ago
                                                      I’m going to need a wrapper for all these services offering this service.
                                                      • truvem 3 hours ago
                                                        [flagged]
                                                        • chinallm_ai 3 hours ago
                                                          [dead]