Cloudflare acquires Human Native to help creators monetize content for AI, signaling a shift toward paid, transparent data markets.
Cloudflare said it has acquired Human Native, a young platform designed to connect content creators with artificial intelligence developers, as it moves to redefine how original content is valued and traded in the AI era.
The acquisition is aimed at making it easier for AI companies to discover and license high-quality content, while giving publishers and creators greater control over how their work is accessed, priced, and monetized. Cloudflare said the deal would accelerate its vision for an AI-driven Internet economy—one in which content is not merely scraped, but surfaced, valued, and exchanged through transparent markets. Financial terms were not disclosed.
As demand for training and inference data grows, content owners face stark choices: block AI access entirely, optimize content for machine consumption, or sell it under terms that reflect its value. Cloudflare said it intends to support all three paths. Human Native’s technology, the company said, will help prepare content so AI developers can reliably find, evaluate, and purchase data through fair and auditable channels.
“Content creators deserve full control over their work, whether they want to write for humans or optimize for AI,” said Matthew Prince. “The goal is not just to block bots, but to build a new economic model that works for the next phase of the Internet—one where content can be discovered, priced, and purchased openly.”
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Founded in 2024 and backed by venture firms LocalGlobe and Mercuri, Human Native set out to address what its founders have described as the “Napster era” of generative AI, in which valuable content is widely used without clear consent or compensation. Its team includes veterans from organizations such as DeepMind, Google, Figma, and Bloomberg, experience Cloudflare said would help it build tools for structuring content for responsible AI use.
“We believe creators should have control, compensation, and credit when their work powers AI systems,” said Dr. James Smith, co-founder and chief executive of Human Native. “Partnering with Cloudflare gives us the scale to make that principle real.”
Investors framed the acquisition as a recognition that high-quality, ethically sourced data is becoming a competitive differentiator in AI development. “The infrastructure Human Native built allows AI teams to access valuable data while enabling owners to price and monetize it seamlessly,” said Ziv Reichert, a partner at LocalGlobe.
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The deal reflects a broader shift in the AI economy, as companies grapple with how to sustain an open Internet while ensuring creators are not sidelined. For Cloudflare, the acquisition is a bet that the future of AI will depend not just on compute and models, but on markets that reward the people who produce the data those systems rely on.
