It's an interesting move from Cloudflare, and entirely rational from their point of view. They need to deal with a coming tidal wave of agentic bot traffic, and one expedient way to do this is erect a toll booth that forces agents to identify, whitelist, and/or pay for access.

I wrote up more detailed thoughts here: https://www.pberg.com/blog/2025/09/25/cloudflares-agentic-to...