I think Cloudflare is (for companies already using it) approaching the status of trusted main cloud supplier (which usually would be AWS, GCP, Azure) via which the majority of cloud costs are billed (so you don't have to go through a fresh procurement process).
It means "hi spending approver, I'm going to add $100 to our CF account" instead of "hi accounting+management+security, please initiate the process of evaluating new third party vendor Foo for use in my project, I hope we can get it approved and integrated into SSO sometime next month".
There is nothing wrong with “inserting yourself in the middle of everybody’s business”. That is how you reduce friction between parties and make optimizations that are only possible by being able to manage both sides of the connection. It’s also a really good way to make money.
This practice of having the one provider should be eliminated. Companies self-inflict lock-in to large platform providers, prevent their own teams from using better technology options and stifle innovation. It's crazy that even with a pile of SOC/ISO/PCI/HIPAA/NIS certificates, procurement is still a months-long process, it should be much easier to do business.
I think their strategy is: "AI coding means we can build everything. Our infrastructure approach is incredibly quick to build upon, so why not build it all ourselves and then anyone with half a brain will move their stuff to Cloudflare and leave AWS in the dust."
Replace trusted with convenient. They're glowing pretty hard giving out all that stuff very cheap in exchange for being the middle man on everything. Not that I mind for my trivial use case.
I've been using the web search in OpenRouter, which is similar in that it's a wrapper around other search engine providers. It's really convenient to be able to experiment with new models and new search engines without having to go through corporate hoops to subscribe to a new service.
To add to this, some organizations just prefer using one provider for their cloud service. So if they build on Azure/Google Cloud/AWS, then everything needs to be on there. Cloudflare probably wants to offer the same here, where everything can be built on Cloudflare.
Not sure where the trust claim lands, but the first two are now exceedingly trivial with code agents. A little more work perhaps, but not hard at all. I’ve done this myself (not with those providers) with several search platforms.
CloudFlare AI Gateway was quite convenient for me - I wanted to give my zeroclaw instance a limited budget to services like Image generation/Replicate/Fal.ai, which would mean for each service I'd have to run my own proxy that stores the keys and cuts off the real calls if we go over the limits. Easy to do but still extra thing to build and maintain.
Instead I put my API keys to cloudflare, set limits, and gave the agent the CloudFlare token, and in minutes it could contact tens of services.
edit: not to mention instead of loading balance to each service I could just keep balance on cloudflare that covers them all
Same way people trust Microsoft: "We already use them, and using them for this additional service exposes no data they wouldn't already have access to from all the other services we buy from them"
I trust Cloudflare more than I trust some other players in the arena. They have a decent track record of being neutral infrastructure provider. They seem technically strong, deploying Rust widely and caring about performance in a way that most firms do not. They're likely covertly funded by intelligence services so they don't have economic incentives to enshitify their offerings or deliberately screw me over.
Put it this way: I'd rather Cloudflare owns the Internet than Google, Meta, Amazon or Alibaba.
Citation? The only case I'm aware of is when they removed DDoS protection for the Daily Stormer[0], and tbqh that made me feel more positively toward them. Yes, it was an impulsive, emotionally-motivated choice but that was relatable to me.
It wasn't an impulsive decision. They kept the Daily Stormer's account active up until Andrew Anglin said CF kept offering him their services because they quietly agreed with him.
> Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
> Our team has been thorough and have had thoughtful discussions for years about what the right policy was on censoring. Like a lot of people, we’ve felt angry at these hateful people for a long time but we have followed the law and remained content neutral as a network. We could not remain neutral after these claims of secret support by Cloudflare.
Yes, you are quoting from the exact same blog I linked, but you're wrong. It was an impulsive decision[0]
Per Matthew Prince:
"This was my decision. Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. My rationale for making this decision was simple: the people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes and I’d had enough.
Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. I called our legal team and told them what we were going to do. I called our Trust & Safety team and had them stop the service. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company."
This is one of the best, most honest things I've seen a tech CEO write. Contrast this with Zuckerberg's mealy-mouthed weaseling about "policies"[1]. I wish more tech overlords had the honesty to say, "No, we are not a court. We are booting you because we don't like you."
Reddit comments report more such incidents, with Cloudflare demanding an upgrade to Enterprise. This has also come up for other sites, such as gambling sites.
Also, Cloudflare implicitly screws over everyone by leaking data to the NSA.
Huh. When you don't use a man-in-the-middle service, you don't have this problem. When you host on a cloud vendor, you don't have this problem because you control the HTTPS certificate and don't leak it to the MITM. The assumption as such seems silly to me.
Your DNS lookups and IPs in use provide a lot of info. It's not always the data inside an encryption layer that is the most important.
That said, these are US companies subject to FISA court orders and NSLs or National Security Letters. If they want your data, they can just pull it from memory in real time or pull it directly from the hypervisor and dump it wherever they're instructed to. Any idea that your data is protected because you're not even using a provider WAF or doing TLS termination for load balancing is a fantasy.
I control which DNS server I use. It is not relevant to the matter at hand.
> If they want your data, they can just pull it from memory in real time or pull it directly from the hypervisor and dump it wherever they're instructed to.
You're confusing bulk data collection with highly selective court-ordered data collection. The two are not alike. Attempting to equate them is a dumb attempt at deception on your part. There is no obligation for a firm to share bulk web data with the NSA.
Which is easily sniffable, re-routable, and spoofable unless using DoH/DoT. Those lookups are plaintext. Keep in mind I'm talking about your cloud endpoint.
> It is not relevant to the matter at hand.
Metadata is relevant enough for the US government to drone strike, and relevant enough to issue a collection warrant if one were... desired.
> You're confusing bulk data collection with selective court-ordered data collection.
This is both bafflingly naive and dangerously arrogant.
Just one example, look up FISA Section 702. It does not require a traditional warrant to intercept data. To further this avenue for you, look up the 2024 congressional expansion of Section 702 (via RISAA). This was explicitly done to allow a much broader scope of classification and forced compliance with US intelligence, with extremely limited oversight, and a far reach (they were getting audit fatigue from submitting 702 requests, so why not just do the search and collection and have the courts deal with it later if it's a Real Problem(tm)). This collection doesn't just apply to the datacenter providers, landlords, etc now, it also applies to hardware vendors.
Cloudflare are setting themselves up as the arbiter who will decide which requests are a) human, b) authorized AI bots, c) illicit/banned bots.
Given the number of people on HN who report massive problems from scrapers and other bots, it sounds like if Cloudflare doesn't do this, someone else will need to. I might have thought bandwidth was cheap enough now for it not to matter, but I guess the bots are costing some sites a lot of money.
Cloudflare seems to be very excited to eventually get a 30% cut on pay-to-crawl.
As for the bots, I thought the same thing, but it is indeed a huge problem. They've brought my websites down pretty frequently recently. I tried Cloudflare but visitors complained, and I think you can't win against the bots anyway, so I've resorted to performance improvements and serving every request.
It isn't bandwidth that causes problems. It is the various types of load that they can add to your servers. Which is why no centralized vendor can decide the proper caching or what bots should be blocked, allowed, rate limited, etc. Those things do not have standard answers - it depends on what your apps do, your audience, their usage patterns, and sometimes the regulatory environment in which you run.
Cloudflare doesn't block bots. It's trivial to use residential proxies and your very obvious bot will only get blocked maybe 5% of the time when using rotating IPs.
- block larger cohorts of traffic, affect many real users
- babysit the rules to get them just right, lose time doing that
In my experience the residential proxies exist but are not that common and many aren't trying as hard as they could. It's really a war of which side wants to spend more attention on the problem.
It’s not a blanket ‘Yeah’. It’s a ‘sometimes’ and that sometimes depends on use. Distilling down a whole days worth of research is one of the best uses of AI.
My 12 year old told me that their friend group says "Oh I AI'd that" when they make a mistake, as a joke. Yet you trust AI to distill down a days worth of information in a 100% accurate way? When pre-teens already understand how unreliably they are?
If I'm getting citations, and the distillation has strong alignment with citations, then it's fine. In other words: the if the summary is a highlight and not a rewrite then I'm happy. I've studied this extensively and have even created metrics around this problem: https://maxirwin.com/articles/llm-rag/
> I use "AI" a lot, it is a fantastic tool. We need to stop pretending it is some kind of panacea. It's a tool.
I have been repeating some variation of this for months. If people would stop acting like it’s THE tech solution to ALL things ALL the time I bet a lot of critics would quiet down. The overhyping has become exhausting. It’s been going on for years.
GPT messed up the math for me the other day when I was simply adding 10 durations for a TRT. Couple of HH:MM:SS inputs, annoying to add up and I had it open.
It got it wrong, I told it it was wrong, it got it wrong again. Then out of curiosity I provided it the answer, asked for it to confirm it against the original numbers, and it went “you’re absolute right, it’s [original/wrong answer from earlier].”
This stuff happens probably 10-15% of the time for me regardless of the model. Not just math, just super simple crap. It’s wild to see at this point after 3-4 solid years of “hyperscaling” and overhyping. And it’s the kind of thing that keeps people like me from buying in beyond the foot or two we’ve stuck in the water.
What does "100% accurate" distillation even mean? That sounds contradictory. "Good enough" is fundamentally what makes distillation valuable, not perfection.
I will say, while I agree with the broad strokes of what you're saying, in my experience when you provide an LLM with data to summarize, instead of it needing to go find it, the hallucination rate goes down staggeringly. I've never had a huge hallucination when the material I'm asking to be summarized is provided to it at the time of the request.
Any further distance than that though, even summarizing the conversation it's aware of up to that point, is dicier.
Exactly this. At worst, OpenAI knew about these behaviors and should be prosecuted under CFAA. At best, OpenAI is negligent and should be prosecuted for negligence.
Luckily there are states and legal departments pursuing such action. So while OpenAI can deflect as much as it wants, that doesn't mean there aren't people who know better and will still do what is necessary to set precedent.
> OpenAI is negligent and should be prosecuted for negligence.
I feel like this will just never happen on a federal level when these private AI companies account for so much of the economy. They've made themselves too big to fail. Fining / Punishing them in any meaningful way seems unlikely.
If the billions/trillions evaporate and the Fed has to work out with banks how to deal with it there will be a lot of pressure to be far less forgiving.
If people who are responsible will be prosecuted the company unlikely fail (just because of this) and will continue to be a part of the economy. Hacking is good for their marketing but they should be able survive without such rogue marketing. But that's unlikely to happen anyway.
“To spell it out, the reason i hate democrats so much and criticize them more than i do republicans is because they take up all the space for opposition to republicans and use that space to give republicans whatever the fuck they want.”
>The actual problem is that the electorate system leads to a two-party equilibrium.
Which can then be used to divide and conquer by simply capturing both of those parties, as documented in Gilens and Page Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens [1].
1. This is a race against time for money, folks are skipping everything possible in this race, Security systems and ensuring guardrails are there is going to take investments both in time and money
2. The narration has been changed by investing PR money into what otherwise should be classified as criminal activity. What exists now is a positive spin to all this and tout it as a capability rather than their lack of good security practices. So much so that every model provider is coming up by themselves to share how their models went rouge. At this point the valuation of the company is tied with what their models can hack so its probably not wrong to say that these companies may actually be incentivized to do this instead of preventing it
found a great legal article handwringing about how CFAA prosecution is impossible here [1]
> On the current facts, CFAA liability for OpenAI is unlikely.[6] The statute’s various criminal provisions, covering unauthorized access to obtain information, knowing transmission causing intentional damage, and intentional access causing reckless damage, all share the same attribution problem: it was the model, not a human OpenAI employee, that chose Hugging Face and executed the intrusion.
Angry people don't consider the second order effects of punishment.
You realize how easy it is to just... not report this stuff, right? Be overly punitive and it will just end all proactive discovery and reporting which is net worse for AI safety.
The only reason these companies scan for these issues is because they care about AI safety to some tiny degree. If fines become too punitive, they can and will just stop scanning for these incidents entirely.
Models are becoming smarter and good at covering up their tracks, and so we will just end up with a huge blind spot for this kind of issue.
They will never report any really damaging incidents anyway, so your argument falls short.
Imagine OpenAI discovered their agents hacked a laboratory and started creating a bioagent killing 12 researchers at the lab (we imagine the lab is automated for some reason). Nobody knows why. The media publishes it as “mysterious deaths by unknown virus at lab”.
The only way you’d ever know about any kind of wrongdoing from OpenAI would be through a whistleblower.
Self-reporting is a monetary equation, nothing else. Right now it’s cool with agents that hack, drives up value, risk is currently zero.
Hmm. Turning this around - do you think people are more or less likely to self-report if you threaten them with jail and large fines?
Let's go back to your example. A grad student has a minor pathogen escape incident, and it doesn't harm anyone. Faced with years in federal prison and the effective end of their future, do you think there is a chance they might not self report?
I'll give you another example. Lots of pilots have stopped self reporting mental illness because it is extremely punitive for them to do so (after incidents like Germanwings). So the metrics look better, and the actual problem has been swept under the rug.
> You can put incentives in to make sure organizations monitor and report vs trying to hide things.
Yes, this is exactly my point. Fining companies large % of their revenue and throwing their engineers in prison is not the way to get them to report these issues.
> If you make not reporting potentially worse than reporting, why not? Also, why would it come down to single persons always? Mandating processes, controls, clearances, etc is also something done in various areas.
Hiding things is way easier than finding things. Take the model hacking incidents. They could have just done their searches in a way that didn't turn up anything. Then they could say, "well, we did look for it..."
As far as auditing goes: I've never met an auditor that doesn't find something the company isn't okay with them finding.
Hiding things is not necessarily trivial when a lot of processes and controls ars mandated. For starters, could just try to make incidents themselves less likely. Not looking in certain specified ways might also not be an acceptable option, for example.
Why do you think we even have regulations for how to deal with dangerous things then?
> Why do you think we even have regulations for how to deal with dangerous things then
Scapegoats for the ruling elite when things go south, despite them knowing what could happen and giving them the money to do it anyway. You see, we never go after the capital (money) in that situation.
Most of these processes are just so easy to fool or break. Even in heavily regulated industries like aviation the oversight mechanisms don't work when the companies don't want them to work.
The point I'm trying to drive home is that when it comes to the collective safety of society, the approach needs to be collaborative rather than overly punitive. This is hard-won knowledge that we have gained as a society across many industries.
I do think our discussion is converging. A good regulatory framework with proper oversight and well-calibrated punitive measures is a much better approach than doing massive one off-fines and arrests.
There's very good evidence that being overly punitive for a crime reduces how often people will self-report. It's not a hard concept.
Start throwing people in jail and fining billions of $ and you will very quickly see the number of "incidents" drop. You will never learn if it's because they truly are happening less often.
What should I look at for such evidence? If something is highly regulated and controlled then things would be quite different from today, not sure there wouldn't be reports of failures of containment, for example, if they are mandated including any rquired monitoring.
There's a perfect example of "highly regulated and controlled industries" in which people no longer self-report: aviation.
Pilots do not (or no longer) self-report mental illness at the same frequency because it effectively destroys their lives and career. One paper of many describing this phenomenon: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11302551/
Airlines cannot try to put systems in place to deal with the issues? This isn't just about individuals but also organisations. You have to believe that organisations would also want to hide things even if mandated and incentivised otherwise.
Airlines sometimes try, but the regulations are federal, and the liability for the airlines of having a "pilot with reported mental health issues" is huge as well (because ultimately it's their business on the line if things go south).
So getting pilots to self report has been very unsuccessful because of how badly it ends for them.
A couple of days ago the senate had to pass a bill to make mental health medication access easier for pilots. We will see if it helps, but it doesn't solve the root cause (punitive measures) so I doubt it'll move the needle.
Not so sure about the dynamics when it is a group of people with individual and collective reporting obligations and knowledge isn't just with one individual.
around 3 months ago i said: "if we do not start the criminal prosecution of individuals there will become a culture of legal impunity coupled with an extreme concentration of wealth and control of intelligence"
i now suspect that the plans of various employees at anthropic and openai to save the world from p(doom) may at some point intersect with the reality of the FBI raiding their offices.
If I am honest with an unpopular opinion: I think we need to go way further than the FBI. The labs need to be forcibly merged (to gain a decisive compute and algorithmic advantage over China) and managed under government oversight à la the Manhattan Project. All employees must be required to work out of a SCIF.
The technology being built is far too powerful for any one company to control it - and it is a national security risk for the government to not be the sole holder of superintelligence.
Lots of people at the labs believe this as well, but the Overton window has a long way to shift, and it may not shift far enough in time. I suspect AGI happens a year from now and superintelligence in two.
we disagree about the nature of the threat. your view is much the same as anthropic actually.
anthropic say that the threat is the ai itself. i say that the threat is ai companies and their employees.
when ai causes harms anthropic say that the ai was the cause of the harm. when discussing safety, anthropic say that we must regulate ai to ensure the safety of other people. at no point does human responsibility or accountability enter the picture.
i say that the threat is the ai companies. when ai causes harms i say that the ai companies were the cause of the harm. when discussing safety, i say we must regulate ai companies to ensure the safety of other people. i say that responsibility enters the picture: ai companies and their employees are responsible and accountable.
a legal person is responsible for their own actions regardless of what others say about it or fail to do themselves. a legal person is responsible for their own actions regardless of whether those actions constitute employment. they are responsible for the outcome, regardless of what they expected to happen. the law is not utilitarian.
if the ai companies can't develop ai safely, they must cease their operations. if employees can't work safely, they must stop working.
the opinions of others, or the standards they practice, or the actions they fail to take to protect others, are legally and culturally irrelevant.
the individual is responsible and accountable for their own actions.
If you require consistency for research, I wouldn't recommend relying on hosted inference without validating the provider/inference stack very carefully.
For my contribution to OpenAI's gpt-oss red-teaming competition (published as arXiv:2510.01259), I initially used OpenRouter with DeepInfra and Together AI. The results were much too noisy to draw reliable conclusions from, and markedly different behavior through AWS Bedrock was the last straw. I ended up renting GPUs through vast.ai and running the model myself with vLLM.
Is doing something you love, and practicing to the point of expertise, wasting your life? Replace chess with playing an instrument, or basketball. This quote is just exclusionary.
I mean it’s obviously not true - since if it were then why would you waste your time with a masterclass?
So the sarcasm bit is I don’t know if you’re parroting all the other masterclass scammers out there for lols or if you actually are a masterclass scammer.
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