Cloudflare launches digital wallet, tools for agentic AI identity and governance

Businesses transitioning to agentic commerce using legacy digital infrastructure are forced into an impossible choice, Cloudflare says. The choice thus far has been between accepting bad actors masquerading as real customer’s AI agents and attempting to adapt tools for detecting bots that were built for search crawlers to agents.

Cloudflare has launched several new software capabilities that go along with or incorporate broader industry efforts to build the governance needed for an anticipated explosion of agentic commerce. The company says its new digital wallets give AI agents the stable identity and safety controls needed to enable online purchases.

The new Cloudflare Wallets and payment platform cloudflare.pay address identity and payments together, assigning unique web addresses to Cloudflare accounts to function as the ID. Customers connect the ID to specific agents, which businesses can then request and confirm authorization for. A Cloudflare “Account Wallet” stores stablecoins, and users can assign “Virtual Wallets” to individual agents to spend from. Users can define spending caps, approved merchants and maximum transaction sizes for the agents.

The new digital wallets and cloudflare.pay will work with the company’s Monetization Gateway, an API for flexible payment rules that uses the x402 protocol. Cloudflare is part of the x402 Foundation, governed by the Linux Foundation, which manages the protocol.

“The Internet is shifting from human-driven browsing to agent-driven commerce, and the infrastructure needs to keep up,” says Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “When an agent shows up at your door, you need to know who sent it. Cloudflare can give agents a face — a link to the human or organization that owns them — so that trust, accountability, and real commerce can follow. It’s the identity and payment infrastructure the agentic web needs to function.”

Cloudflare also recently integrated Mastercard’s Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M) to help enable fast, small scale agentic transactions.

Agentic commerce also requires visibility, which is where the new Identity-Aware AI Gateway and accompanying feature User Insights from Cloudflare come in.

The software allows enterprises to trace every agentic action to a verified identity, Cloudflare says in a separate announcement. The Identity-Aware AI Gateway and User Insights also track AI use over time to enable cost-efficiency decisions and establish normal usage to generate alerts in cases of unusual activity. Businesses can also integrate their digital identity provider and Zero Trust architecture with the software to enforce identity-based access and authentication.

Ping Identity announced an integration in June of its Runtime Identity with Cloudflare to help bring digital identity enforcement closer to the point of authorization.

“Putting Cloudflare Access in front of AI Gateway gives each request an authenticated identity and lets us use our existing identity policies at the gateway,” says Flexport Security Engineer Max Baumgarten. “Our teams can adopt AI tools without creating a separate authentication system for every client.”

Article Topics

agentic commerce  |  AI agents  |  Cloudflare  |  digital identity  |  digital wallets  |  identity access management (IAM)  |  non-human identities