Cloudflare Birthday Week 2025 Recap: AI, Security & Internet Insights
Presented by: João Tomé, Nikita Cano, Korinne Alpers
Originally aired on September 30 @ 12:00 PM - 12:30 PM EDT
In this episode of This Week in NET, host João Tomé is joined by Cloudflare Senior Product Managers Korinne Alpers and Nikita Cano to recap all the announcements from Cloudflare’s 15th Birthday Week.
We cover AI, developer tools, security, performance, and how Cloudflare continues to give back to the Internet.
Highlights include:
• AI & Security: Firewall for AI, Shadow AI protection, and Content Signals Policy.
• For Creators & Nonprofits: Project Galileo expansion and new tools to control how AI uses content.
• New Economy: NET Dollar and the x402 Foundation with Coinbase.
• Developer Platform Upgrades: Cap’n Web RPC, VibeSDK, AI Search updates, PQC in WARP, and more.
• Investing in the Future: 1,111 interns in 2026 plus new student and startup programs.
It's 15th Thursday and this is literally what we do best and what we love most, building technology that gives back to the Internet and I think we've done well.
I'm so proud of us.
Such a good week, I know. This was so exciting. And for you, Korinne, it was the first.
Nikita and I have been here for a while and so we know the gist but it's always amazing to see, especially the effort of so many teams putting together a deadline, trying to achieve something in a deadline week like TechCrunch Disrupt 15 years ago.
So always amazing to see. Yeah, it was so cool just actually seeing how everything comes together and how so much of the ideation is like what would be really cool to give out for free for everyone.
Like that's how every conversation for planning was.
Can we go bigger? Can we give something even, you know, make it more accessible?
What could we do that would benefit the Internet even more?
So it's not just something that we say externally, it's actually like internally.
We just went to a bunch of teams like, can you do this? And everybody was really excited.
It was an awesome experience. Hello, everyone, and welcome to This Week in Net.
It's the September 29, 2025 edition.
And it's all about Qualthr's main innovation week of the year, Birthday Week.
After a week full of announcements where we hope to give back to the Internet, let's do a recap.
I'm your host, Runtume, based in Lisbon, Portugal. And with me, I have Nikita Kano and Korinne Halpers.
Hello, everyone. Hey, how's it going?
Good. For those who don't know, where are you based, Korinne? I'm in the central coast of California, though I am moving up to the Bay Area next week.
So, but in California.
True. Very nice. And Nikita? Yeah. It's in London. And it's not particularly sunny today, but why not?
In Lisbon, it is actually. Sunny day. Looking forward to going there for Tech Summit in November.
We will be presenting and demoing some of the new products to our solutions engineering, so hopefully.
And if you come to the Lisbon office, you'll have a great view to the bridge, similar to the San Francisco bridge, actually.
Yay. I know. It's so beautiful. I haven't been to Lisbon ever and need to get out there and see the office.
You should, you should.
The office was buzzing this week because we had many people celebrating 15 years of Qualthr, the lunches, happy hours.
It was really buzzing, to be honest.
I'd never seen the office like difficult to find a desk and it was really difficult to find a desk.
This week, really difficult. So, it's really buzzing. It's a full birthday week, like not only full of announcements, but also on that regard, I posted an episode of This Week In Ed on Tuesday with Michelle Zetlin and Matthew Prince, all about the first days of Qualthr, 2009.
And then 2010, TechCrunch Disrupt.
In September, September 27th, 2010, it was the launch of Qualthr and we went over those first days.
That period was quite interesting also to remember for them, for me to understand a little bit more what happened, quite interesting to see specifically.
For those who don't know, as I said in the beginning, Birthday Weeks is all about giving back to the Internet, helping build a better Internet, and it's always full of announcements.
It started exactly at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2010, but also TechCrunch Disrupt 2011, where we presented products at that time.
So, it has been a tradition since then. IPv6, exactly, integration there.
Universal SSL in 2014 as well in the same Birthday Week. There's a full set of history here.
What can we say about this Birthday Week in particular in terms of topics that were addressed as products?
This is our biggest one ever, I think.
I don't want to use this lightly in any way or form, but I'm pretty proud of what we presented, and I think this is our most ambitious yet.
And so, we have sort of segmented it because we had so many announcements.
We had 40 plus announcements.
So, it was really a quest of, A, picking the best ones of what we had to offer and what we could ship this week, and then make them make sense in a sort of cohesive, holistic lineup.
So, roughly, it's not a strict methodology, it's not maths or rocket science, but roughly, we had a day about empowering the future generation of developers, democratizing development.
And Karin and I chatted about this extensively on a Monday episode.
So, if you missed that, then do go there because we had a lovely conversation about that.
Then on Tuesday, we were all about building a smarter, safer, more open web, and there was a sprinkle of AI and security in there because it's 2025, come on.
Wednesday was all about securing the future by default.
Keywords, inserting, post-quantum, quantum signals policy, AI crawlers, and it's the bus.
It's everything that you want to secure today and the future in one day.
That was one of my favorite days. Thursday is Karin's land.
Karin is responsible for workers and developer platforms. So, I'm not going to steal the privilege of talking about that.
Thursday, we had so many announcements that it was honestly overwhelming.
I think all of us were just seeing them roll through and being like, I don't even know which one to highlight.
They were all amazing.
So, we kicked off. One of the biggest announcements we had on that day was making it possible for you to basically announcing the intent for any customer being able to get a feature that is typically on an enterprise plan, being able to self-serve them.
The blog is fantastic. I recommend anyone just read it, but I think what we're seeing is just how can we make it so not only teams of all sizes can get features that have been traditionally only available to enterprise customers, just be able to get them for their own sake, and then also not have to go through the normal channels of like contact a sales rep, just making things a lot, a lot more scalable.
People are very excited about it. It was really cool to see it come in.
And then the rest of the day was developer platforms. So, we had a huge, big bulk blog about all of our different announcements.
So, we had basically everything we've been doing with NodeCompat, and there was a really big deep dive on Node compatibility.
We also had a great story about how many things we've been GAing.
Something that people probably know about the platform is we're constantly just shipping.
We have a very big goal of just like innovate, innovate, get something out, get people playing with it, and then keep building upon it.
But then we also have to do the follow-up and make sure that we have tidied things up and we're ready to GA them and say these are stable.
So, birthday week is a really good opportunity to look at everything that's been in beta and just say, is this ready?
What do we need to get these teams ready to GA this? And that was quite a fun internal drive.
It's like, okay, what do you all need? We had great announcements around our Cloudflare data platform.
So, back during developer week, we acquired a company called Arroyo.
This fantastic developer and founder, Micah, joined our team and then started working on how can we make things, again, that have been traditionally only available to enterprises who have resources to maintain and do all the compaction for data lakes.
How can we make that accessible for any kind of developer?
And so, that was the main theme for a lot of developer platform announcements is like, here's things that you would think only big organizations can handle managing and scaling the infrastructure.
And then Cloudflare is basically saying we can take care of the heavy lifting.
That's what we provide. And then lastly, the thing that people always are excited and have been asking about us is the Cloudflare email service.
So, that was a huge announcement. I think that was something that people talked about the most that day.
It was. On Acker News, definitely was.
I was checking today and we're recording this on a Friday. There were over 500 comments on Acker News about this one in particular.
It was really fun planning this event because I think, Nikita, you and I had early on been told like, hey, try to get a blog on Acker News.
That's something that we really wanted to do.
And we managed to get three on one day, I snitched. Well, yeah. Monday, we had three on the top 10.
So, the top page. And I think that set everything off really well because we're like, okay, so we already hit the main metric of success.
And we kind of went into it thinking we can't, when Cloudflare is having a birthday week, we're having a bunch of innovation announcements.
Usually, moderation tries to not let Cloudflare completely take over Acker News, but there was so much engagement and so many comments.
Great Kenton blogs. So, I think we got two this week, which was great.
So, we can talk about Friday as well.
Today, all the announcements. Yay. Matthews. Here, Nikita, you cover the main ones on your side.
Yeah. So, the Friday was all about speed and performance re -engineered.
And it's funny how that ties back to what developer platform did on Thursday, which is like, hey, how do we take this from, mom, I did this to, this is now GA, enterprise grade.
And everyone can use this from Fortune 100 to your favorite bakery.
So, we've done this to ourselves on Friday. If we think about Cloudflare as a product, like the whole thing is a product, then that tech crunch disrupt thing in 2010 was like an alpha.
Then somewhere along the line, when we did universal SSL and improved our core platform stack, and then they actually rewrote this from PHP on LuaJIT, we became better.
And now, finally, 15 years later, we are replacing that whole stack from the first commit of Lee Holloway to then a follow up by Dane with a new Rust powered modular proxy system that takes the whole Nginx out of our pipeline and makes our entire CDN fast, secure, and memory safe.
And it affected almost every single team that does anything that's related to HTTP at Cloudflare.
And the blog post is absolutely amazing. When I was reading this, this morning, before it got shipped, and I have a privilege of, I was PM for FL product for a year.
And I saw sort of the beginnings of this project. And we sacrificed many features to get this done, because we understood the fundamental importance of this to the future of Cloudflare.
And it was like, if on Monday, when we had free blog post on Hacker News, I was like, oh my god, this is actually happening.
Like this birthday week is real. It's not something that I've dreamed up for the past few weeks.
It's actually a tangible, almost physical thing. And I had the exact same sensation, reading the Friday blog post that like, oh my god, this is this thing that we spent countless hours designing and making sure that this architecture actually works is not only real, it made 20% of the Internet faster, just like that.
And you're like, this is incredible innovation. And I'm so privileged to even like remotely touch it and be around it.
And the people who did this are brilliant.
So if you want to read one blog post out of the whole Friday lineup, start here.
I'm pretty sure after you read this one, you would want to read all that ones.
So start here. And then there was a lot about performance and visibility into performance, as well as visibility and transparency into the Internet itself.
We recorded a lovely Cloudflare TV segment with the Raider team about regional level Internet insights that we've rolled out.
And you can now track trends, not only for countries, but down to very specific ISN network in a very specific part of the country, which is incredible, not only for local outages, but there are massive countries with many different states inside them.
And the dynamics of the Internet are very different for them.
So now we are exposing the vast amount of data to the researchers so that they could really drill down and hopefully make sense.
And then certificate transparency, which was actually, to be fair, prompted by our own incident.
We noticed that somebody issued a certificate for 1.1.1.1 a month ago that thankfully was for their test environment.
And we have a long story of people trying to use 1.1.1.1 as a sort of test IP prefix.
But as always, in a real Cloudflare fashion, if something happens to us and we feel like this may hurt anyone on the Internet, we usually have a very good practice of, let's make a product that fixes this for us and make sure that this doesn't happen to anyone else on the web.
So this was more or less it for Friday. And then there was our classic network performance update.
So if you like milliseconds, test numbers, and worldwide maps with colored graphs of who is fast where and how that changed tangibly from the previous year, you're in for a treat.
And we've been doing these for a while now, for a few years in terms of looking at the world.
Yeah, 2021 or something.
But now we have, much like I called the radar team, the cartographers of the Internet.
I think this is like the snapshot of how fast Internet is for the past four years.
We went really fast through Monday. Monday was a very important day in terms of announcements.
We mentioned already a few. One definitely is giving back, clearly.
For example, the free access to Cloudflare developer features for students.
One of those that's all related to giving back. And also the fact that we're hiring 1,111 interns in 2026.
Many interns. We've been having some interns this summer here in the Lisbon office.
And one thing that for me is quite incredible is how much interns can do in terms of real impact.
It's amazing. And also we need to figure out how to pronounce it.
It's an art to quad one. Exactly.
Like quad one intents probably is the best way to pronounce it. I have already three open racks for intents.
So shameless plug. If you want to come and build Cloudflare tunnel and quick tunnels with us, here's your chance.
Join the team.
I've found multiple people be like, can we get some of those interns? I'm like, there's a lot of them.
I'm sure you can. It'll be really cool because I think the interns, the tasks that are going to be given is come on in, look around and then see what we are doing that doesn't make sense to you.
And if you've like a lot of these people that are coming out in this intern class have been raised with the Internet and probably are using AI tools already in school or even like in other internships and are going to come in and kind of disrupt and say, this is what you should be doing.
This is what I've been been trying at my university or at this other job.
And I think all of us are very, very excited for them to kind of just, yeah, wreck shop to a certain degree.
Yeah. And there are sort of three most important things about this because I feel like there is also a sort of moral value in there.
We are responsible for the future generation there. So it's very important that A, these people are not just there to learn about corporate culture or how a company works.
They solve real world problem. They deliver real world product that is adopted by real people.
So it's not just come and hang with us and maybe you will learn something about how the technology works.
No, you're not only going to learn how the technology works, you are also going to build that technology with us.
Well, they're going to outnumber a lot of us, like they're going to come in.
And I think that we feel very much like the interns are going to shape the Cloudflare culture, not the other way around.
Yeah. And that's how it should be. Like they are the future.
So come and tell us what the future is. And then the second thing that's very important is not just, you know, we offer you the skills and the knowledge.
No, it's a paid internship. Like, yeah, it's important. Like you deliver the new technology.
You bring the real value. You are compensated for this, which is great because early on in the career, it's very important to have this reinforcement that there is a tangible relationship.
You give something back to the community, to the Internet, to the technology.
And that appreciation boom ranks back to you.
So this is super important for me personally, that we are doing this.
Actually, I have many interns here in the Lisbon office next to me, where I'm seated here, that were interns two weeks ago and are now full employees.
That's exactly.
They ended their internship two weeks ago. Now they're here as full employees.
Exactly. So many of the EMS that I've been working with just were interns previously, like last year, and they're so incredible.
And one thing that's really cool, too, I feel if you've ever had like an internship at a company, oftentimes you're yeah, you're kind of given work that doesn't have tons of high impact.
You're just kind of like meeting people and it's really good experience. But here you're given like a lot of responsibility.
You're kind of treated like you're our intern.
We're so excited. Can you help us with this project? And then also you get to actually, because Cloudflare is such a, I don't know, we have so much infrastructure that impacts so many people.
You get to really see the changes you make hit actual users.
It's not just like five people are using your product.
It's really, it's a big, big impact. Interns are given a ton of like opportunity and yeah.
Responsibility as well. It's like you see the change you're doing.
And I think the beauty of this is it makes you think about the problems holistically in a very responsible way early on, because just solving the problem in any possible way is not good enough.
You have to be really, really sensible and really responsible in how exactly you're solving this, who this is for.
Is this the smartest solution known for this problem?
Is this possible today? If this possible today with the given technology, probably you're not pushing yourself hard enough.
Yeah.
It's quite interesting to see the mix of ages here in Lisbon. For example, we have interns 20 and 21 years old.
We have a Salesforce team. We just mentioned email blog written by Salesforce and there's older folks.
And that makes quite amazing to see people collaborating.
Hey, I can give you experience. You can give me new ideas.
It's quite interesting to see. I was telling the interns here, I wish I had that possibility when I was 20 and 21 years old, a few years ago.
Having that possibility of doing so much and having that.
Before we were mentioning Monday, another of the blog posts there is regarding supporting the future of the open web.
Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarkey. Supporting the future of the open app is something that is also core to Cloudflare specifically.
And this also got a lot of attention.
What can we say here? Everyone is just excited about...
For the past 10 years, I think the whole world was standing on two big turtles.
One is Chromium, another one is Linux. And everyone is genuinely excited to see a third and a fourth turtle potentially answering the picture.
Because I think as much as I like Chromium and Linux, we want diversity.
We want different technology geared towards different people.
And it's exciting to see something new on the blog that unlocks different perspectives for everyone.
So I think that's the genuine excitement around it.
We haven't seen new technology of that rank for quite some time.
And we are really happy that we get a chance to support this.
Yeah, I think some of the best announcements from this week have been us putting our money where our mouth is and investing in our peers, like our Tuesday announcements, where we partnered with Webflow and Netlify to support Tanstack and Astro.
And then again, our investment just basically saying no strings attached, we're going to give you some money so you can keep doing these big projects because we know that big ambitious projects need a ton of support.
It takes time.
So Amarchi and Ladybird browser, even planning them when we saw all this coming in, we're like, wow, this is crazy.
This is so cool for Cloudflare to spend time and develop these relationships and partner with people that traditionally we wouldn't expect Cloudflare to go ahead and team up with Netlify and Webflow.
But I think it's really showing how much Cloudflare, it's one thing to say you are pro open web and really actually doing it and investing in it.
I like that this also opens the door for it. We haven't only cherry picked Ladybird and Amarchi, right?
We have opened the door on the same day to everyone.
We were like, guys, we have these amazing offices in Lisbon, in San Francisco, in Austin.
What's the third location there and the fourth location? Well, we have these amazing locations in San Francisco, Austin, London, Lisbon, and we want people that are building anything new, any kind of new technology, anything interesting and exciting for the better Internet to come and hang around, like come and just use our space, use our knowledge, show us your idea, bounce back the feedback.
And you don't have to build anything for Cloudflare or with Cloudflare or anything around this.
We're just excited to see like-minded people that are building something new.
In terms of giving back, there's also the free access to Cloudflare developer services for nonprofit and civil society organizations.
Always one of those things that we typically also do.
And related to that, actually, we also have, I mentioned in the beginning, introducing free access to Cloudflare developer features for students.
Right now, more U.S. based, but it will hopefully open as well.
We are already there. Being worked on. That was something we really wanted to make happen.
It was just a short turnaround. Yeah, really excited.
I feel when I was in school getting to use so much software because there were so many startups coming out that were giving free betas to other student emails.
That is like how I was able to actually get internships and stuff.
It's just being able to use these tools and make a whole new thing. We want to make sure that every student in the world has access to the greatest tech.
And same for nonprofits.
The announcement around nonprofits is sort of a compilation.
We've had this lovely program, which I think turned 10 recently, which is Project Galileo, about giving the enterprise grade services to nonprofit organizations.
But over time, I think our product roster expanded well beyond what Project Galileo was geared towards at the beginning, which was literally protecting the free media and nonprofit organizations and governmental organizations from DDoS attacks and making them secure.
So Project Galileo is more about securing and protecting rather than building.
And then we have Cloudflare for Startups, which is kind of build the next big thing on Cloudflare.
And security is adjacent. By the time Cloudflare for Startups was launched, security was a given.
We've made this a commodity.
It's no longer a privilege. Versus when Galileo launched 10 years ago, security was very much a privilege.
If you couldn't afford these massive hardware boxes with firewalls built in them, you were not protected from DDoS attacks.
And we were still living in the world of scrubbing centers and massive traffic bills for everything.
Like nonprofits are also contributing greatly to our future.
So we should give them the same building blocks and the same tools that we're giving to startups to make sure that they can build their next greatest thing on Cloudflare as well.
And that's what this is all about. True. And there's also related Project Galileo actually helping protect journalism and local news from AI crawlers with Project Galileo and the inclusion there in terms of having the bot management and AI crawl control services quite up to date in terms of what is the actual situation now in terms of LLMs and crawling over the Internet, not getting the traffic that once journalism organizations had.
So also important in terms of making it free for journalism.
Yeah. If anyone missed the original Matthew's post on this, I think back from July, was that?
It was July 1st. The picture and the field really clearly.
I think it's laser focused on the right thing, which is LLMs are inherently trained on content.
And it has to be good quality content to have a good quality output.
And because LLMs advanced so quickly and so fast and so widely spread now, now the content that was generated by LLMs that wasn't the best quality is being fed to train the next generations of them harder and harder to maintain the quality of the output because the quality of the input is no longer as good.
At the same time, people are best at producing their own content themselves because every piece of novel idea comes from a human being.
LLMs are not yet there to generate something that was never thought about or dreamt by a human being.
So it can combine building blocks from something that was input in it, something that it was trained on, but it cannot generate a completely groundbreaking idea on its own.
This is what humans are for. And people who create content, they are the drivers of this groundbreaking idea that is gonna turn the world into a better place, right?
And journalism is one of those things where through analysis and through a lens of a particular human with analytical, critical thinking, and with personal experiences in the field, we can synthesize this new idea, right?
And launch this new thing and the new trend and the new even philosophy maybe in the world.
I think the journalists and the analytics of today's world are kind of the philosophers, the same philosophers that wrote books and essays back then in medieval times, right?
So we need to have that level of quality content to be available to AI models so that AI could be sustainable, smart, and actually improve our life and not degrade the quality of the life.
So for that, we need to find a way for these two different things to exist happily in the world, right?
And this could be something that compensates the content creator and at the same time makes this novel idea available for AI to build on top of that.
And that's all about that.
Something that is kind of not the big headline of this week, but is inherently related to it is not only we've launched that, but we've also launched an infrastructure that powers that mechanism of rewarding underneath.
And that's a code name.
I think it's Netcoin. Are we calling this Netcoin? Yes, it is. It is Netcoin. Yes.
So if you haven't seen anything about that, then do take a look because it's a very interesting piece of technology that's going to open many doors for the future of this relationship between content generators and AI providers that want to use this content to train their models on it.
I do think it's really, we've had a lot of like themes building up over the week and a lot of them, and over honestly the whole summer, a lot of them have been like, obviously the nature of producing content, the incentive structure are changing rapidly and Cloudflare, like we always like look at how our own infrastructure is just so well positioned to like have things baked in because we have, we're just like at the network level can do a lot of things.
And something too that Matthew Prince has a lot of background in is like law and being able to take on some of the heavy lifting of like, if you're a small time blogger and you don't have the like resources to actually like think through all the legal implications of your content being used by AI, we like released basically an update to robots.txt, like how you could adjust the license to be able to say, yes, I want my content to be able to be used or no, I don't.
And then now we had the launch of the announcement with our partnership with Coinbase of like X.402, like the actual spec of how we could handle these like microtransactions and pay people for their content being used.
And then the net coin and kind of just like building upon like, this isn't just something that we're thinking about and putting out ideas for.
We actually have like a plan and we're partnering with other people who have tons of experience in this and using our own infrastructure that does, like has already the tools built into it to be able to make this happen at a really large scale.
And then partnering with people like Coinbase who have the same like technology and expertise.
So this was a, yeah, a lot of these announcements were really cool.
I remember when the founder's letter kind of came out on Sunday and a lot of the comments on Hacker News were like, you know, this is great and I like the vision, but if they don't have a plan for payments, like I don't see how this is going to happen.
And just knowing internally like, oh, it's coming.
We are talking about it. It was really, really cool to kind of see everything roll out slowly.
It's also a positive reinforcement of what we are doing because sometimes, not only with birthday weeks, when you are shipping a product for usually, sort of the baseline is some kind of assumption.
You may vet this and somewhat confirm it through research, but genuinely at the sort of very base of it is some kind of assumption and usually personal assumption based on your own experience.
And when you see people asking for things that you are already building and you didn't know that they would ask for them when you started building them is a very nice feeling for the teams working on these products because it validates that their original idea and spider sense that this is important was right.
This is actually the site, netdollarCloudflare. They make this so last minute.
They're so good. It has this magical touch. When I saw this, I was like, I wonder if people that made agents .Cloudflare.com, which is a beautiful agentic site, behind this as well, because this has the same level of refinement of style.
I was very happy to see this. It's quite amazing for sure. Anita, you mentioned the founder's letter that goes along though that part of Internet's business model, the changes, traffic, the difference with value.
It has a lot of, some of the announcements have this in its base specifically.
It's also rewarding better content.
I recommend reading this just to kind of see the entire narrative that our founders have been thinking about for some time.
This didn't just come out of nowhere or just this summer or even for birthday week.
This has been something that I think since, especially LLMs have been popularized over time, people have been feeling the heat come on.
It's exciting to see us keep iterating on it and even internally seeing more and more plans kind of, okay, how can we keep using this momentum to go forward?
Yeah. It's also like the founder's letter is usually a very good sort of window into the world of what's coming next because it's not a wrap up that we are doing today.
Hey, we've already announced this. Now let's sort of trace back the story of how it came through to fruition.
Founder's letters are usually the visionary things that we are discussing.
Like all of these ideas came from Matthew, Michelle, and everyone in the company throughout the whole year.
And because these ideas were vocalized, we started building and moving in that direction.
Something that we probably should talk before our time is out is all of our AI and agents updates as well.
So something that we came out with on Tuesday, I believe is when we released the Vibe SDK, which is basically an open source toolkit for going ahead and building your own Vibe coding platform.
This was amazing.
In one click, right? Deployed in one click. All of this work was done by our ETI India team.
And they were just incredible and just hacking away at it.
They turned this around really, really quickly. And a lot of people are already playing with it.
I've played with it a little bit. It's amazing because not only does it mean anybody can make their own Vibe coding platform from like a student in their dorm room, but also internal teams at different companies.
And we've already been reached out to by people being like, oh, we're going to use this internally.
This is great because we're already using Cloudflare. And this is just a great open source platform that is completely just given out to the world and then see what people build.
Another thing, I think today we released a bunch of amazing work.
One of them was the demo and a blog, a content blog about code mode.
And it's kind of like taking a look. We've been really working with a lot of the people on the MCP initiatives.
And code mode is kind of just looking at how LLMs are not traditionally trained on MCP tool calls, but they are really trained on TypeScript and JavaScript.
And so basically being able to, instead of using tools, converting those tools into an API that LLMs can go ahead and interact with, and then using our sandboxes to execute that untrusted code safely.
So solving, I think we're all just kind of like moving forward on MCP and looking at some security gaps.
And Cloudflare is many, many things.
And one of them is a security company. I'm trying to think of any other big AI.
I know that we had AI week previously and it was cool to keep thinking.
AI is probably another thing that ties to the security company. So we know about many different models that exist in the world.
We also know about many different shapes and forms people access these models.
And Cloudflare 1 is the platform that is geared towards corporate networks and how teams and enterprises all over the world access the Internet and their private networks together in some sort of unified connectivity cloud.
So because we know about the models and we do have really smart people that know how to categorize them and what good looks like and what safe looks like and what questionable looks like, they've come up with this great, completely transparent methodology of how to score how legitimate and safe an AI model could be.
And they've released it as part of Cloudflare 1 so that you could use the scoring system to decide which models your team should be able to use when they are doing the work, which is very important because it's not only a big enterprise problem.
Anything that you insert into an AI model can be used to train this AI model further on.
And it's a question of legal framework and what you give consent to, but technologically speaking, anything can be placed back to train this model back.
And this raises a question, do you want the data that you put into it to be used to train this model?
And is there a risk of exposing this information to another user of that model if they ask a question that's nearly relevant to what you've placed in there?
And will it contain any sensitive data that you've put in there?
And we know that some companies are really good at protecting the privacy and cleaning up the data and making sure what goes into the training data sets.
And some, we are not really confident because we don't have the facts about this.
And you can use our knowledge and you can apply the same principles that we are applying inside our company on what you can use and what you probably shouldn't use to automatically control what is going on with your team and with your enterprise and which data should be placed in which AI models and how secure we believe that is.
There's one from today, actually, that I saw being written yesterday by Celso, an AI index for all customers, like create an AI optimized search index for your specific domain and expose that set of ready-to-use standard APIs and tools externally.
It's quite amazing to see how that was built fast, specifically.
Yes, it's in private beta, but it's, I think, was really exciting since it's come out.
So it's built using also our previously called Autorag technology, now called AI Search.
And yeah, it makes it possible so that people who have domains hosted on Cloudflare can go ahead and just use Cloudflare services to go ahead and create a search index so that your content can be used in things like AI overviews, that kind of thing, or be accessed in different chat interfaces.
It's very, very exciting. It's kind of the control of like, if you're protecting your content and you don't want it to be used by AI models for free, you have the AI crawler protection and robots, TXT and all the other tools that we are shipping that help you protect your content and potentially ask for compensation for this content to be used.
On the other side, if you are wanting to give your content more exposure by making sure that AI models have access to it, and not only they have access to it, but they can also consume it in the best way possible for them, which makes this content really shine through and be used to respond to the users.
You have this thing that essentially takes the stuff that you put out on the Internet in your Internet property and makes it available for AIs in the way that's best for them to index it.
Yeah. I think it's always just really cool when, I mean, something that we always do is we just do the hard parts.
We take care of abstracting away so much complexity of infrastructure, and so many people now can take advantage of all the work that we take just building, taking care of scaling, things that are very hard and you need specialists for.
Absolutely. Just before we go, there's at least two things I want to highlight before we go.
One is securing data in SaaS, to SaaS applications.
This sales loft breach, recent sales loft breach, was really important and taught us one thing.
Companies do not have visibility over data in SaaS applications.
This is actually going into something, a vulnerability that was a breach, in this case, that is recent.
Being aware of what happens and reacting to it is a bit what this blog and announcement is about, so also interesting specifically.
Another thing, it was a press release specifically. It was about UNICEF, Calvary UNICEF, GigaPartner, to accelerate school connectivity worldwide.
Also, a very give back to the Internet and give back announcement specifically.
Yeah, that one's cool.
We're giving them our speed test technology to build into their maps.
Since we have such an expansive network, you can actually measure connectivity globally really, really well.
That one was an exciting one. If I could plug two more blogs that I would recommend.
Sure, sure. My favorite blogs on Monday, I think it was the Cap and Web, a new RPC system for browsers.
That one's amazing.
As someone who previously worked on GraphQL tools, GraphQL has one of the major benefits of it is just solving the waterfall of calls.
If you need an ID in order to access another resource, you need to get the ID first and then go back and make these subsequent calls.
Basically, this handles it, but you don't have to do the hard parts of GraphQL, which is standing up a schema and a separate GraphQL server.
This is great. This was one of the ones that did really well for our technical audiences too on Hacker News.
People were really excited about this.
Then lastly, Harris Hancock had a blog that came out today. It was kind of a part two to eliminating cold starts with sharding.
That one is really interesting because we basically looked at how we handle cash hits and cash misses and used the same kind of thinking and applied it to workers to manage cold starts.
Really, really great.
Highly recommend reading that one. Absolutely. Before we go, people can browse through the blogs in blog .callflare.com and in our hub.
As we were mentioning, also there's Call Flare TV episodes for people to see more details and the press releases that we just showed.
Anything that we missed that people should know about birthday week 2025?
There will be a wrap-up post that we're just about to finish.
Yes. I'm sure there is stuff we missed. It's been a crazy week, but the wrap-up post will have more.
Exactly. If you miss something, then start with wrap-up post and make your way back to where it all started.
True. Wrap -up post actually gives the same thing that are in the hubs in a sense, organized way in terms of days and topics that you mentioned in the beginning.
That's also a good way to go about and read some of the blogs that we mentioned and some that we didn't mention because there were many blog posts as usual in the birthday week.
Amazing.
I'm so excited. Oh, well. It's 15th birthday and this is literally what we do best and what we love most, building technology that gives back to the Internet.
And I think we've done well. I'm so proud of us. Such a good week. I know. This was so exciting.
And for you, Karin, it was the first. Yes. Nikita and I have been here for a while, so we know the gist, but it's always amazing to see, especially the effort of so many teams putting together a deadline, trying to achieve something in a deadline week like TechCrunch Disrupt 15 years ago.
So always amazing to see.
Yeah. It was so cool just actually seeing how everything comes together and how so much of the ideation is like, what would be really cool to give out for free for everyone?
That's how every conversation for planning was, can we go bigger?
Can we give something even, make it more accessible? What could we do that would benefit the Internet even more?
So it's not just something that we say externally, it's actually like internally, we just went to a bunch of teams, like, can you do this?
And everybody was really excited. It was an awesome experience. Absolutely.
Any feedback from the week that you got that you want to highlight here specifically?
So many announcements, so many things, but maybe there was one. Fever dream.
I think people being really excited about email service was really exciting.
I think I was surprised how much the CapnWeb blog really resonated with people.
I knew I was personally interested in it, but seeing how many people were excited, the Vibe SDK was the most, like I think got most viral on Twitter.
So that was really cool to see.
I think in general - Ad coding is popular these days. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think in general, the cool thing was we've been shipping a lot this year.
And I think people kind of seeing birthday week continuously coming out with even more stuff.
Everyone was just like blown away, including us planning it. And there were even things that are pretty huge announcements that didn't make it this week.
And then we know we're coming in the next few weeks. And I'm very excited for them.
Yeah. It's always a fine line of like what gets in the lineup and what is saved for dessert and what sort of is a starter for it.
Hosting-based routing for Cloudflare Tunnel, aka Project Onuma as we call it internally, became a starter.
We actually shipped it on Thursday before birthday week. And it was originally the plan to do this during birthday week, but we had so many announcements and so many things we wanted to present.
So it made more sense to ship it earlier.
And we did this. And there are some things that are so big that they couldn't fit in the box.
So they are coming later. So if you think that we have shipped everything that is important this year, you are very mistaken.
Mistaken. Yeah.
It was cool. Huge announcements fell through. We're like, that's fine. We have we have too many.
We were good. We'll see. Yeah. Thanks so much for doing this. And let's have another birthday week next year.
And here's for another 15 years at Cloudflare.
Yes. Thank you. And that's a wrap.