Cloudflare surges as viral AI agent buzz lifts expectations

Jan 27 (Reuters) - Cloudflare shares surged about 14% premarket on Tuesday as social media buzz around the "Clawdbot" ​AI agent rekindled investor enthusiasm for the company's tools ‌that help run the technology.

Developers building with Clawdbot, which is based on ‌Anthropic's Claude, use Cloudflare's low-latency infrastructure to securely connect with the agent and run it locally on devices, enabling autonomous task execution.

Clawdbot drew thousands of GitHub stars and trended online over ⁠the weekend, feeding hopes ‌that "agentic" AI, systems designed to execute tasks autonomously rather than simply answer prompts, is moving ‍beyond demos toward broader, real-world use and could fuel the next leg of the AI rally.

Cloudflare's globally distributed edge network and consumption-based pricing ​model position it to benefit as AI agents scale ‌up.

The San Francisco-based company is scheduled to report earnings on February 10, when investors will be watching closely for signs that AI-related activity is translating into increased traffic and revenue.

"As agentic tools like Clawdbot scale (making more API calls, hitting more ⁠websites, generating more traffic), we believe ​NET is positioned to capture that ​activity," Wolfe Research analyst Joshua Tilton said.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told analysts on the company's third-quarter earnings ‍call in ⁠October that Cloudflare estimates about 80% of leading AI companies already rely on its infrastructure.

"The agents of the future ⁠will inherently have to pass through our network and abide by ‌its rules," he said.

(Reporting by Harshita Mary Varghese in ‌Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid)