Cloudflare just made a bold move in the increasingly chaotic battle for the creator economy by acquiring Human Native, a UK-based AI data marketplace. The acquisition marks the internet infrastructure giant’s commitment to what CEO Matthew Prince calls “Act 4 of Cloudflare,” a system that pays creators for the content that AI developers actually use to train their models. As the AI industry faces a growing backlash against uncompensated content scraping, the deal allows Cloudflare to bridge the gap between Silicon Valley’s appetite for data and creators who want fair compensation.
Cloudflare has just made headlines in the increasingly confusing debate over who gets paid when AI companies train models on content from the internet. The internet infrastructure company announced Thursday that it will acquire Human Native, a London-based startup that acts as a marketplace for deals between AI developers and content creators.
There’s no price disclosed in the deal, and while Cloudflare is keeping it quiet for now, the strategic intent is pretty clear. “Content creators deserve full control of their work, whether they want to write for humans or optimize for AI,” CEO Matthew Prince said in a statement. It’s not just PR talk. This shows that Cloudflare is positioning itself as an infrastructure layer that has the potential to reshape how the messy business of AI data acquisition actually works.
The problem that Human Native solves is deceptively simple. AI developers need high-quality data to train their models, and creators need to be rewarded when their work is reflected in those training datasets. Currently, the industry operates primarily on the assumption that scraping the open web is fair game. Cloudflare wants to completely flip that script.
Prince has been working towards this moment for months. Back in August, he told CNBC’s Jim Cramer that protecting creators’ compensation has become a core mission. “I think this is the fourth act for Cloudflare, as we help make sure content creators get paid and we help the web’s business model continue to survive and evolve,” he explained on “Mad Money.” Last summer, Cloudflare announced a product called AI Crawl Control. The product allows websites to limit and monetize AI bots that scrape content as training data. The acquisition of Human Native expands on that vision, giving developers a legitimate way to get data while creators get paid.
Timing is what makes this move smart. The creator economy is colliding head-on with the AI boom, and the collision is getting uglier. News organizations are suing OpenAI, and lawsuits over unlicensed training data are piling up. Meanwhile, creators from writers to artists are furious that their work is being used without permission or compensation. Cloudflare is betting that the market will eventually demand fairness built into its infrastructure, rather than added on later through litigation.
