New acquisition strengthens Cloudflare’s AI data marketplace capabilities, enabling creators and publishers to monetize high-quality, AI-ready content through transparent and ethical data exchange.
Cloudflare, Inc. has announced the acquisition of Human Native, an AI data marketplace designed to connect content creators, publishers, and AI developers. This strategic acquisition enhances Cloudflare’s ability to support the rapidly growing AI-driven Internet economy by transforming original digital content into high-quality, AI-ready training and inference data.
The addition of Human Native will enable AI companies to more easily discover, access, and license reliable datasets, while empowering creators and publishers to surface, price, and monetize their content fairly. By integrating Human Native’s expertise, Cloudflare aims to accelerate the development of a new business model for the Internet—one that promotes transparent value exchange, ethical AI development, and sustainable content monetization.
As the demand for generative AI training data continues to grow, access to trustworthy, high-quality content has become a critical competitive advantage. Content owners now face pivotal decisions about how their data is used by AI systems—whether to block AI crawlers, optimize content specifically for AI consumption, or license their data through paid, transparent channels. Cloudflare is committed to supporting all of these options by providing creators with tools that give them full control over their digital assets.
Human Native will play a key role in helping Cloudflare build scalable tools that prepare and structure content so AI developers can easily find, access, and purchase ethically sourced AI data. This approach ensures creators are compensated appropriately while enabling responsible AI innovation.
“Content creators deserve full control over how their work is used—whether it’s written for people or optimized for AI. We’ve already given publishers tools to control AI bot access. The next step is building an economic model that works for the future of the Internet. With Human Native, we are creating the infrastructure that allows content to be discovered, valued, and purchased transparently at global scale, helping protect the long-term health of the open Internet,” said Matthew Prince, Co-Founder and CEO of Cloudflare.
“We founded Human Native to move generative AI out of its ‘Napster era’. Creators should have control, credit, and compensation when their work is used to power AI systems. Our values are deeply aligned with Cloudflare’s vision, and together we can deliver ethical AI data solutions at true Internet scale,’” said Dr. James Smith, Co-Founder and CEO of Human Native.
Founded in 2024 and backed by leading UK venture capital firms LocalGlobe and Mercuri, Human Native was created to address the growing imbalance between content creators and AI companies. Its mission is to foster a more equitable, transparent, and scalable relationship between the creator economy and AI platforms. The team brings deep industry experience from organizations such as DeepMind, Google, Figma, and Bloomberg.
