| ▲ | Agents can now create Cloudflare accounts, buy domains, and deploy(blog.cloudflare.com) |
| 145 points by rolph 3 hours ago | 68 comments |
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| ▲ | _pdp_ 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| The reason this blog post does not come with any concrete examples how to use this enablement for useful and constructive things tells you something very important - it is a toy and they do not know who and how they will use it. It is cool feature but to what end? Buying a domain is not something you have to do daily to require any kind of automation. I am also not sure who Stripe Atlas for. I am genuinely confused. It is definitely not something a developer will use. I understand that you can bootstrap a number of systems but that is like half-hour of work and arguably it is probably a good idea to do it manually to make sure you have strong foundations. I've have personally never seen a good example where a cross vendor account provisioning actually working. For example, Fly.io used to provision Sentry accounts automatically which you could not access in any other way but through Fly.io. I mean the Sentry account was effectively locked to a project that you cannot transfer - hijacking the actual global alias as well. Vercel did something similar with PostgreSQL via Neon and Redis via Upstash resulting in painful migration processes. I can imagine ending in some kind of deadlock between services due to security hence why the 30 minutes initial setup is kind of time well spent to avoid future issues. Maybe it's me. |
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| ▲ | grey-area 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Perfect for spammers, scammers and domain squatters, who can now automate their activities even more. Can’t think of any other uses for this given the current state of LLM ‘agents’, though I can’t wait for the next report of something like ‘openclaw registered 1000 domains for me without asking and now cloudflare won’t refund me’. | |
| ▲ | cromka 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Buying a domain is not something you have to do daily to require any kind of automation. Sorry, but no, you totally miss the fact there are domain farms which buy the dropped domains and then offer them up for sale. Bots now use AI to analyze the domain's value and automate the whole process. To be able to let AI buy it as well likely offers a tremendous amount of time saving. | | |
| ▲ | przmk 19 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | It offers value to parasites who buy domains and resell them? | | | |
| ▲ | Griffinsauce 5 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | So actively making the internet worse.
Awesome. | |
| ▲ | 2000UltraDeluxe 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's not like there aren't others who sell domains with an API. This doesn't change that much. | |
| ▲ | misnome 19 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Hasn’t all that been automated by people for decades anyway? I guess this, lowers the barrier to entry for this extremely specific niche? | |
| ▲ | fontain 5 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Complete and utter nonsense. Domain registration is already API driven and has been for decades. The most sophisticated domain name investors (or "domain farms") go as far as to own registrars directly so they have instant access to the registries. Nobody involved in domains would use Cloudflare's product because they already have and have had automations for decades. For example, DropCatch (NameBright) own over 1,000 different registrars so that they have over 1,000 direct routes to Verisign's .com registry. GName are a new player in the space, approaching 1,000 registrars. The amount these companies spend on their registrar licensing alone is many millions of dollars[1]. Cloudflare's product adds nothing new to the world of domains. Anyone has been able to go to OpenSRS and sign up as a reseller with API access for over 20 years. [1] The majority of ICANN's registrar revenue comes from just a few companies that own thousands of registrars collectively: https://www.iana.org/assignments/registrar-ids/registrar-ids... cmd + f "DropCatch" and "GName" |
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| ▲ | jackconsidine 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That is ironic. Four years ago, cloudflare didn’t let human me have an account / buy domains because I signed up, never used a single service but didn’t respond to a request to verify my drivers license > This account is in violation of Cloudflare's Terms of Service. Specifically fraud. The suspension is permanent. (Yes that’s really it. Sincerely. No “but I also abused X”) |
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| ▲ | nojs an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | This conflict is popping up everywhere. There is a push by a lot of companies to allow agentic use of their services (and new companies explicitly offering "X for agents"), ignoring the fact that "agent" means the same thing as "bot" which we've spent the last couple of decades actively filtering out. Will be interesting to see how it plays out. | | |
| ▲ | janalsncm 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | In defense of old-school bots, we had to code them up by hand. | |
| ▲ | Gigachad 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | The future is the internet will be entirely bot activity and humans will ether be strapped in to the metaverse reels ai slop feed or they will be outside interacting with people in person again. Both of these seem like likely futures and probably both at the same time. |
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| ▲ | captn3m0 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > By agreeing to these Terms, you represent and warrant to us: (i) that you have not previously been suspended or removed from the Websites and Online Services CloudFlare ToS has you covered. A human must accept it, even with the new agentic flow. | | |
| ▲ | jasomill 4 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I think this is just saying you can’t sign up for a new account after a previously created account gets suspended, not that the act of suspension itself causes you to violate the the terms of service in perpetuity because, pedantically, any suspension that has happened, happened “previously”. |
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| ▲ | c-linkage 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | faangguyindia an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| One of the well-kept secrets about Cloudflare is: You can have a zero-cost inbox. Earlier, I was using Zoho and FastMail (however you dice it, it will use some money, $12 a year for Zoho and $7 per month for FastMail? Even then, perhaps you only get one mailbox and some aliases) but with this method, I get unlimited aliases, domains, and mailboxes: Now, I wrote a script which captures the email and saves attachments to S3 using the HTTP API (why S3 and not R2? Because Cloudflare wanted a credit card, and I was too lazy to add it there lol) and emails to D1. This uses an email -> webworker workflow. I use an API to fetch my emails. This means all my inbound emails are now handled by Cloudflare, and I can easily use all of it with zero payment. The best part is this supports tokenised emails, so I can provide a unique email address to each service I sign up for. I am using SES as the sender. I’ve set up one script which auto-sets up any domain in SES and auto-verifies the sender email. The funniest thing is I am receiving zero spam? As if other email providers sell my email? |
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| ▲ | dewey 33 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | That's not a well kept secret, that's just a workflow that almost nobody would accept for their email setup which is the center of most people's digital identify and should always work and not be a duct taped construct to save a couple of bucks. | |
| ▲ | twothumbsup an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | cf bought an email security company a couple years ago so wouldn’t shock me they have good spam filtering. | |
| ▲ | fragmede 31 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's pretty neat! What do you use to send and receive emails on your phone? |
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| ▲ | firefoxd an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The agent start a phone call, listens to the person on the line, analyzes which fraud bucket they fall into, and start the process. While they are on the phone with the agent, it buys a domain relevant to the victim, the agent codes and deploy the website specially catered to them and the fraud bucket. Collect payment, destroy the website, redirect the domain to google.com. no need to start a new call because you had several agents committing the same fraud in parallel. It can also be used to make art. |
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| ▲ | zelon88 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| And CloudFlare engineers sleep comfily at night knowing that they just produced 800 lbs of carbon emissions to generate a static "Hello World" HTML page. I see the amount of work that gets put into these workflows and it boggles my mind that anyone thinks that it's faster or easier or more convinient or more cost efffective than installing a LAMP stack on one of the 6 laptops they have stuffed in a closet. God forbid anyone have any native local capability. |
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| ▲ | unglaublich an hour ago | parent [-] | | But they paid for the emission just like every other electricity consumer? Then who are we to determine the Hello World page is morally more wasteful than outdoor terrace heaters or advertising jumbo-trons? | | |
| ▲ | zelon88 an hour ago | parent [-] | | I hear your argument. However, you assume CloudFlare pays taxes and utility rates comparable to what other customers pay. That is never the case with large businesses. CloudFlare seems to be less parasitic than others in the industry, but they are not doing this for the charity. For example, in 2024 JPMorgan received a $77m subsidy to build a datacenter that created only one permanent job. https://nysfocus.com/2026/04/20/data-center-tax-break-jpmorg... | | |
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| ▲ | faangguyindia an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Most of the sysadmin and devops team have been downsized in India because of AI. Basically, now it's trivial for any new devops guy to run such a query in Claude Code: “Log in to this production server, find out all services it runs and their deployment method, create documentation about everything, and generate a repeatable, auditable deployment workflow.” Devops and sysadmins can no longer withhold information to maintain job security. Boom, 80% of the team gone. I know companies are doing migrations of production Postgres and MySQL on 1000s of machines using AI agents. I’m imagining how many SaaS will be automated out and simply be an "agent skill" in ClaudeCode. |
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| ▲ | otterley 35 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Can you support this claim with some evidence? Not just about the redundancies, but I’m also particularly interested in hard data showing Claude is capable of doing that kind of research with near 100% verifiable accuracy and migrations with no data loss and equivalent functionality (which is required to sustain your claim). | |
| ▲ | zbentley an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Devops and sysadmins can no longer withhold information to maintain job security. I can't imagine this is very prevalent. That's a very 2004-style corporate immaturity; I get the sense that even the slow-moving behemoths of the software world have mostly caught up to, say ... 2017's recognition of the importance of automation and reproducibility and won't tolerate the kind of malpractice you describe--wilful information siloing by infrastructure teams. Like, those businesses might well suck at automation! But they've been doing it and firing the people who resist it for a long while now. | |
| ▲ | vatsachak 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Epic. Can't wait for those humans to be rehired after you find out that letting Claude perform 1000s of migrations autonomously is a bad idea | |
| ▲ | bakugo an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Only downsized? I would expect them to cease to exist entirely in the coming years, as western companies begin to realize that AI is cheaper and more competent than the Indian firms they usually outsource work to. |
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| ▲ | hboon an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I was pleasantly surprised when I read the headline a few days ago. But it's only accessible through Stripe right? I'm simultanenously very concerned about the centralized control that Stripe gains (it's not going to be just access to Cloudflare) and also amazed at how Stripe is shaping to be. It was just a payment processor. |
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| ▲ | aleksiy123 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I was wondering if someone was going to allow payments through CLI at some point. But jokes aside having a central place to manage billing and accounts for deploying infra across multiple providers is pretty awesome imo. if they have a terraform provider even better. I wonder if also makes multi tenant architectures or environment isolation easier to provision as well. |
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| ▲ | skeptic_ai 42 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Wait until one account is banned, and then all linked accounts are permanently banned. |
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| ▲ | debarshri 13 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Ps. Agents can also sell and delete domains. |
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| ▲ | baalimago 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Genius! Automate the flow for making customers spend money. |
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| ▲ | readitalready an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This probably started because of Andrej Karpathy's complaint about deployment being more painful than coding itself. |
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| ▲ | schpet an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| why does cloudflare not allow existing users to create new accounts? you basically need to use a burner email and transfer it afterward. makes it awkward to use this on new projects that you want independent of your existing accounts. |
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| ▲ | saneshark 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Claude has been buying domains and deploying to Vercel for me using aws cli, vercel cli, and gh cli since December. Personally I prefer a cli to an MCP server for this type of thing. |
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| ▲ | Waterluvian 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Are any of these domains public? I’d love to study and better understand the use case for needing to AIify this. | | |
| ▲ | saneshark 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | All of the domains are public. Whenever a new model comes out I like to ask a very specific prompt that helps me identify niche markets with high buyer urgency, have the AI rank them across a rubric, pick the one that has the highest degree of automation potential and then have it build me an MVP. I’m not trying to shamelessly promote here but since you asked one of them is at jobwiz.biz | | | |
| ▲ | threethirtytwo 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It’s not AIifying one thing. It’s AIifying the entire work flow… every detail. Allowing domain names is just one aspect of it. The agent does everything. “Make a website that does…“ and it can handle everything from start to finish. It’s that good now. | | |
| ▲ | SpicyLemonZest 44 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The question was what's in the dots. I have no doubt that agentic systems are good enough to buy domains and make one-shot websites from a prompt, but what is the legitimate use case for which you'd want to repeatedly perform "Make a website that does..." on a new domain? | | |
| ▲ | fragmede 24 minutes ago | parent [-] | | "Legitimate"? What scams are you implying are happening? A friend of mine wanted a site to help him sell DJ lessons. Another friend has a haircutting business that wanted a better site. Massage therapy. Etc. |
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| ▲ | charcircuit 12 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So does this mean banned sites can now come back as long as they have an agent make an account instead of the banned user. |
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| ▲ | arjie 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Fascinating. This is through Stripe rather than wrangler or anything. Coding agents were pretty good at handling the Cloudflare API already with an API key, but I think this thing that Stripe is doing by being the central hub through which all agent stuff goes by integrating with their CLI is a pretty good move for them. |
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| ▲ | stevefan1999 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Can I make a bot to buy the domain at the best price, transfer that domain to Cloudflare instead? |
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| ▲ | caymanjim 15 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Cloudflare's prices are already close to unbeatable. They basically resell at cost. But there's nothing stopping you from doing that if you want. |
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| ▲ | Phelinofist 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Soooo they built.... an API? |
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| ▲ | jakebasile 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| As a user of the internet I can only imagine this worsening my experience by allowing even more slop to permeate the network's every orifice. Also, when an agent sets up a domain, who is the domain owner? Who responds to takedown requests? What if it then decides to host illegal content at the domain (generated or otherwise). Who is responsible? Agents aren't (yet) legal persons, so it must be the person who owns the agent, but if that person never even sees the legal agreement being agreed to how would it hold up in court? If the person didn't direct the creation or hosting of illegal content, what then? |
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| ▲ | idank an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Humans will not win in court with a "but the agent did it, I had no idea" argument. Just look at how the cases against OAI are going, and that's where families lose a loved one. There's not going to be any sympathy when your agent committed fraud on your behalf. And it's not like pro agent companies have a reason to self regulate. They're not going to absorb that liability voluntarily, they'll push it onto users contractually (most of them already do). This is just another channel to bring in customers. They will capitalize ruthlessly to increase their bottom line. | | |
| ▲ | zelon88 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > There's not going to be any sympathy when your agent committed fraud in your behalf. Good thing the fraud is committed in places that specifically don't prosecute fraud when it's targeted against Western countries. | |
| ▲ | skeptic_ai 39 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Fraud requires intention |
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| ▲ | 14 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Interesting questions you bring up. Especially the legal ramifications as to how it would fully work within current legal framework.
I suppose there would be a broad disclaimer and agreement one would have to agree to that would state that users of the service are ultimately responsible to monitor and ensure websites deployed by agents comply with local laws.
Ultimately I assume that since it is not the agent who pays but a registered user that the user would own the site. And that the legal agreement would be agreed to beforehand so it is legally binding. |
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| ▲ | floodfx 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I clicked through the $100k credits link and didn’t see Cloudflare listed as an Atlas partner? (Maybe not updated?) This looks interesting nonetheless. |
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| ▲ | sovenyr an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| don't even supricezed - I've done it before even without agents |
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| ▲ | swader999 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Who goes to websites these days? |
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| ▲ | rvz an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > At the end, the agent has deployed to production, and the app runs on the newly registered domain: Soft scammers, fraudsters and defamers are celebrating in copying websites for malicious intent. For sure this is going to get abused. |
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| ▲ | slopinthebag an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Thank god, this is what we've been missing on our quest to make software better for our users. |
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| ▲ | DeathArrow an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So they made it possible for agents to spend people's money buying their services. Why didn't Amazon think of that? |
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| ▲ | hedayet an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Nice. Another step closer to the "dream" of filling the web with trash at scale |
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| ▲ | armanj 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > buy good luck |