{
  "id": 18452384,
  "title": "AI agents are a ‘bane’ for some website operators, says Cloudflare",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/11/06/ai-agents-are-a-bane-for-some-website-operators-says-cloudflare",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-11-06T04:25:14.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "The Register Science",
    "slug": "the-register-science",
    "url": "https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/11/06/ai-agents-are-a-bane-for-some-website-operators-says-cloudflare/5308022"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince warned that nation-state actors and criminals may have exploited a PHP2SHELL vulnerability before its disclosure, as revealed during the company's third quarter earnings call. Prince emphasized that these vulnerabilities had been circulating for years, and his team was investigating evidence of their use. Prince also noted that some of Cloudflare's customers find AI agents \"a bane to their business\" and prefer to keep them away. To illustrate his point, Prince imagined using an agent to choose a restaurant after investor relations duties, highlighting that 999 of the 1,000 restaurants the agent might search would incur costs without receiving any benefit. Prince acknowledged that web searches have always yielded low-value traffic, but he believes that the volume of agentic activity, expected to be 1,000 times greater than human clicks, is now an unprecedented problem. Prince also expressed concerns about containers, which he believes are becoming a casualty of the agentic era. He attributed this to the cost-prohibitive nature of container-based architectures in the face of the 1000:1 bot:human traffic ratio Cloudflare anticipates. Cloudflare has developed serverless \"Workers\" service and products designed to block, ameliorate, or monetize agentic traffic. Prince stated that 5% of the web opted into Cloudflare's content protection products since July 1st, with Meta being an existing customer. He also cited a 39% year-on-year revenue growth, with quarterly revenue reaching a record $782.5 million. Despite the alarming number of new security vulnerabilities, Prince remains optimistic about Cloudflare's prospects, stating that the company is among the first to receive quiet disclosures and remediate new vulnerabilities before they are publicly disclosed. Investors responded positively, sending Cloudflare shares up approximately 15% in after-hours trading, recovering and surpassing earlier losses following a major drop in US indices.",
  "summary": "CEO says sovereigns probably exploited PHP2SHELL ages ago, and suggests containers are dead",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}