Cloudflare, Inc. has announced a collaboration with Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Shopify to address growing challenges as artificial intelligence and autonomous agents generate increasing volumes of Internet traffic.
The initiative also aims to develop a new privacy-preserving Internet protocol to help websites distinguish legitimate users and AI agents from malicious automated traffic without relying on invasive tracking or CAPTCHAs.
Dane Knecht, CTO of Cloudflare, said: “As AI-powered traffic becomes widespread, existing tools to support its use are too generic and coarse. Now this collaboration lets us eliminate the friction caused by security protocols for every visitor—whether they are human or agent—without sacrificing privacy.”
Securing AI-powered traffic
The initiative introduces Private Access Control Tokens (PACT), an open standard designed to enable trusted platforms with verified user personhood to issue anonymous tokens to enhance privacy and security.
These tokens can then be presented to other websites to confirm that a request comes from a legitimate human or authorised agent while protecting users’ identities and browsing history, as existing tools for preventing abuse, including forced logins, tracking technologies, and CAPTCHA tests, are becoming less effective.
“Shopify is proud to help develop PACT as an open, privacy-preserving standard that can help the millions of businesses on our platform distinguish legitimate shoppers and authorised agents from abusive traffic while preserving buyer privacy,” said Ilya Grigorik, distinguished engineer at Shopify.
“The health of the web depends on effective, interoperable, privacy-preserving tools that enable sites to combat abuse without unnecessary user friction. Microsoft is excited to collaborate on developing new standards and helping ensure their deployment across the open web,” Erik Anderson, director of Engineering, Web Platform at Microsoft Edge.
“An avalanche of automated traffic is pushing sites to adopt blunt defences—paywalls, identity checks, CAPTCHAs, and invasive tracking—simply to tell whether a request comes from a human. We can build a better solution that maintains strong privacy and provides a much less annoying experience for real humans using the web,” said Bobby Holley, CTO for Firefox at Mozilla.
