Cloudflare launches AI shopping ID and wallet service

On Tuesday, Cloudflare, a cloud computing firm, announced a service designed to enable AI agents to shop online on behalf of their human operators. The offering has two main components: cloudflare.pay, an identity tool, and a paired wallet. Together, they address a practical problem in agentic commerce—the automated buying and selling conducted by bots—which has become urgent as bots have come to dominate web traffic.

According to Stephanie Cohen, Cloudflare's chief strategy officer, approximately 57% of web traffic now consists of bots. This dramatic shift, driven by advances in AI systems, has created what Cohen describes as "a new world of business opportunities." The identity component of cloudflare.pay works by assigning each user a permanent web address that serves as a bot-readable identity. When a user's agent approaches a merchant, it can present this identity to confirm it is acting on the user's behalf—though users retain the option to remain pseudonymous. The wallet portion holds stablecoins (dollar-pegged digital currency) funded by a bank transfer. Users grant their agents permission to access the wallet and spend within parameters the user sets: optional guardrails include spending limits and a whitelist of merchants where agents are permitted to shop.

Cloudflare has also built AI tools for merchants to communicate with customer agents seeking information or wishing to purchase. The announcement reflects a broader thesis about how commerce on the internet will evolve. Historically, bots were treated as a threat or nuisance—a small fraction of traffic. The internet itself was designed around HTML pages meant to be readable by humans and organized around bundled subscription models for content and data. But a bot-first internet, Cohen argues, can be structured differently: information can be conveyed in shorter, machine-focused formats, and goods and data can be sold piecemeal rather than in bundles. "The internet needs a different business model," Cohen said. "And so, if you look at what Cloudflare has been building towards, we've been building towards that future, which is that every interaction on the internet is a chance for commerce."

The field of agentic commerce is not entirely new. Amazon's "Subscribe and Save" service, which allows customers to set up recurring orders, has functioned as a basic bot-driven purchase for years. However, the emergence of advanced AI systems such as Claude and ChatGPT over the past two years has dramatically expanded what agents can do, prompting a rethinking of internet architecture itself. In the near term, Cohen expects tech-savvy developers and AI companies—particularly those looking to purchase data—to lead adoption. A second wave powered by ordinary consumers is anticipated, contingent on the development of easy-to-use shopping agents. Wider adoption will also require regulatory frameworks and coordination from payment processors and merchant companies to address fraud and other risks. The groundwork is being laid: an open-source protocol called X402, developed by a consortium including Coinbase, Cloudflare, and Stripe, is already being standardized. Incumbents like Visa and Mastercard are retooling their payment infrastructure to support bot commerce. Cloudflare is not alone in the space; last week, Moonpay, a crypto-native payments firm, unveiled PayBox, a decentralized AI wallet designed for consumers using Claude and OpenAI.