Cloudflare acquires UK startup Human Native to build AI data marketplace for content creators

Who gets paid when AI trains on your work? Cloudflare thinks it finally has an answer.

The internet infrastructure company said Thursday it has acquired Human Native, a U.K. AI startup that runs a marketplace connecting AI developers with content creators. The goal: create a system where creators can decide if their work can be used to train models — and get paid when it is.

Financial terms were not disclosed, and a company spokesperson declined to share more details.

“Cloudflare has acquired Human Native, a UK-based AI data marketplace focused on turning multimedia content into searchable, usable data,” the companies’ CEOs said in a joint statement.

Cloudflare buys Human Native to monetize content used for AI training

For Cloudflare, this move signals a deeper shift in strategy. The company wants to build tools that let AI developers “find, access and purchase reliable high-quality data through fair and transparent channels,” according to the release. Human Native already manages those transactions, making it a natural fit for Cloudflare’s broader vision.

“Content creators deserve full control over their work, whether they want to write for humans or optimize for AI,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in a statement announcing the deal.

Prince said the acquisition will accelerate the development of a system in which AI companies pay creators when their content is used for training. That could reshape a debate that has become increasingly heated across the tech industry. News publishers, artists, and writers have pushed back against AI firms for scraping their work without permission or compensation. Lawsuits continue to pile up, and regulators are starting to take notice.

“This acquisition is about building the tools needed to protect the longevity of the open internet,” Prince said.

Cloudflare has been laying the groundwork for this shift for months. Last summer, the company rolled out AI Crawl Control, a feature that lets website owners block or charge “AI crawlers,” the bots that sweep the web collecting data to train large language models. The product gave publishers a rare level of control over how their content gets used in the AI economy.

Prince hinted at this direction back in August during an appearance on CNBC’s Mad Money. He told Jim Cramer that helping creators get paid could become “the fourth act” of Cloudflare’s business, framing it as a long-term mission rather than a side project.

The market seems to like the pivot. Cloudflare’s cybersecurity and AI-related products have helped push the stock up more than 60% over the past year as investors pile into companies seen as beneficiaries of the AI boom.

For creators, the stakes are personal. Training data has become the fuel for modern AI, and the people who produce that data have largely been left out of the revenue loop. Cloudflare’s bet is that a transparent marketplace can fix that, letting creators opt in, set terms, and finally get paid for work that’s already shaping the next generation of technology.

Whether AI developers will embrace paid data at scale remains an open question. Free scraping has been the norm for years. But with lawsuits mounting and public pressure rising, Cloudflare is positioning itself as the company that builds the rails for a fairer system.

The internet is changing. Cloudflare wants to make sure creators still have a seat at the table when it does.