It seems that cloudflare is trying to create an internet-wide agent identity platform in general. I have seem few attempts at “agent identity” but they were all intrinsically limited to a particular system. An identity AWS IAM assigns to an agent isn’t gonna work on rottentomatos.com or techcrunch.com.

This was always a vaguely desired thing, but the implementation details was always a form of OIDC federation which is mind-numbingly complex and not worth the hassle. Just shove an api key or a shared secret of some sort and move on. Only accounts that are very high value targets for attacks (cloud infra accounts, CIs infra, billing, and things they interact with implement OIDC federation. But that awesome Thai recipe blog has no chance of implementing something like that.

With Agents driving internet traffic, there is a desire to have identities for them. And since it’s inherently easy for them to leak these identities (look at the million sandbox solutions that all share the same dumb goal of “protect the API Key or password”), having short lived tokens for everything (AWS IAM or Azure Managed Identity like) simplifies the entire process. Agreeing on the single IdP was the problem, there are like 40 (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, even GitHub, and Amazon have SSO not to mention all the regional specific ones)

There is a legitimate need for that, and it looks like cloudflare figured if they are that “internet agent identity provider”, then there is a lot of power and control over the internet and AI use in general.