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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’.

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LLM generation in general provides the most use to scammers and the like. Generate emails which people won't read, generate articles which are just honeypots or rip-offs, generate images to said articles, generate more and more spam.

Every legit use case for LLM practically requires that human would verify the result manually, at least briefly. But spammers can enjoy skipping that step, since content was never a main priority in the first place.

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I disagree frankly, as the next wave is clearly fully autonomous businesses.
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Agreed, "fully autonomous businesses" is evolutionary next step for spam.

Spamcorp services are the future. Don't resist it, that would be futile.

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I challenge you to explain a business plan for a fully automated business that isn't at least a bit shady.
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And cloudflare can actually sell them priority access to pass their bot protection or introduce micropaiments for agents access content. I feel cloudflare is getting a bit scary tbh. It is like your friendly bot net.
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This made me realise they’re doing the same thing the AI labs are doing: selling both the problem and the solution.

They are arming spammers and scammers with these tools so you need their product to protect yourself from them

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Welcome to the grift economy.
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state did this for centuries or longer btw. they create violence/war in some area of the planet, then offer to "fix it".

like wmd's in iraq and hormuz problem now, lmao. remember how hormuz was not a problem and it was wideoy peaceful and open months ago? lol

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It's the western great fire wall, good thing the things within the fire wall is huge and encapsulate still most of the world.
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I mean, Cloudflare was always kind of scary. They filter the world wide web, literally.
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Yea, I appreciate them protecting it from DDOS. I always viewed them as a responsible company.

To me this feels irresponsible and like it's main goal is to forward autonomous cyber attacks. Which is antithetical to what they do? Maybe I am missing the legitimate use case here, but I can only see this being used for removing responsibility from crime or espionage?

Does anyone know offhand if cloudflare is a department of war contractor? I never looked into it. But this smells funny to me

Somehow the Internet needs biometrics and age verification everywhere but also chat bots can buy property there without too much thought.

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The DNS provider I recently switched to surprised me with a policy:

To create records for more than one domain, you need to write a personal support email.

They say it's to raise DNSSEC awareness, but I think it's also a robot captcha.

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Are you perchance talking about deSEC? I've also switched to them, and thought that it was too much work to send an email and wait for replies, so I ended up using dummy inboxes for my other, lesser important domains.

Though I guess it's still a good thing they do this? At the time I remember being mildly inconvenienced, but not enough to actually care. I just remember thinking, "How is this nonprofit going to handle all that support volume?".

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That kind of captcha has a very short half life. Software ate the world now AI is eating software
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> To create records for more than one domain, you need to write a personal support email.

I'm not all familiar with this so I don't understand why it's not a ticket or any other non-automated action even for a single domain ?

I mean what is "the standard" that would actually allow a robot to register a domain to a DNS registry ?

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The new goal is to flood the Internet with so much junk that human-created content can be sold back to us in a walled garden.
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I think this post needs to be put in context, for months now Cloudflare has been releasing products that allow their whole platform to be usable by agents with the main objective of enabling their customers to dynamically write code using Cloudflare, this is just another step.

For example, you can now with Artifacts and Dynamic Workers make a lovable-style SaaS where your customers ask the AI agent to write software for them, the agent can run it in sandboxes with no build step, it can version it with a git-compatible API, and now you can even have it buy a domain for the end customer or set up their own cloudflare account when they want to move to production.

I personally have no use case for creating domains via agents, but some of the other features they're releasing around this area are extremely useful and I've started to ship internal tools for my clients where they are used, like giving them their own mini claude code that only does one thing – one I shipped last week was an agentic interface for Salesforce reports that understands their domain better (and all the undocumented tech debt) than the built-in Salesforce AI does and therefore manages the context better

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> I am also not sure who Stripe Atlas for.

It's for founders who don't have lawyers. My co-founder and I are both developers, we used Stripe Atlas to incorporate a C-Corp due to expecting to fundraise <1 year after incorporation. Stripe Atlas generates about 200 pages of legal boilerplate documents with very sane defaults so that your corporate structure, bylaws, IP protections, director indemnity, etc. align well with investor expectations. It helps investors not have to "rules-lawyer" all your corporate records during due-diligence, because their content exactly matches YC's expectations.

-------

I said we made a C-Corp but other founders should default to LLC, which Stripe Atlas can also streamline. An LLC is superior to C-Corp in pretty much every way for any pre-raise founders who don't have an extra $2,000 to >$10,000/year they're willing to part with for higher franchise taxes, "foreign" (different state) corporation registration, CPA's, and additionally lawyers if any investments aren't YC SAFE's (e.g. not YC, Neo, or A16Z SpeedRun).

Also note that for pre-revenue C-Corps, Delaware franchise taxes are scaled against number of shares, not company revenue or # of employees, so you can save some money by forming your company with 1,000,000 shares and then file a "Unanimous action of the board of directors" to increase it to 10,000,000 just before angel/pre-seed/seed round, and potentially save a few hundred dollars on your first year franchise taxes, depending on when you incorporate and raise. But if a few hundred dollars makes a difference to you, incorporating as an LLC instead of a C-Corp is the only defensible decision.

And as always, start your taxes 3-4 months before they're due. If you want a CPA to do them (which you should if you have any revenue), you'll need to retain them way ahead of time for C-Corps. If you're filling tax forms out yourself, you'll want to start at least a month before they're due.

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People use agents to deploy sites all the time. Buying a domain is part of that if you want to build a site that's beyond a toy. Allowing agents to do a task isn't just for things you do every day – it's also for things you do rarely and need agents' help. It's not just devs using agents to perform these sort of tasks anymore.

Stripe Atlas makes it massively easier for startups to incorporate in Delaware. This is particularly hard for non-US founders. It solves a real problem. I don't think this part will be done by agents though!

Disclaimer: I work at Cloudflare but not on this

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Lets remind the purpose of incorporating in Delaware is legal tax evasion, so that we don't not have pensions, health insurance or anything nice, really.

Rename to Greedware.

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Please explain. Your comment reveals your lack of understanding of corporate law and the benefits of one state versus the other. And smart companies are going to incorporate in Texas anyway and it has nothing to do with taxes. More to do with corporate governance.
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The primary purpose of incorporating in Delaware is less about taxes and more that Delaware is the "Silicon Valley" of corporate law - incredible concentration of professionals, infrastructure, and intangibles. Any dispute you have will generally be handled better, faster, and cheaper by Delaware courts than they would be anywhere else. I'll quote my good friend who is a startup M&A lawyer: "I'd go so far as to say that it would be managerial malpractice to incorporate anywhere other than Delaware."
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Nevada makes it much harder to sue corporate officers when they do malfeasance. Wyoming has tons of privacy perks for the officers (similar to cayman island accounts). “Perks” though also convert into signaling for the intent of the founders.
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Investors usually expect that non-US founders incorporate in the US, and usually expect Delaware. There are other states that are more friendly to tax avoidance. Delaware is mostly preferred because it's a known quantity with mature regulation. Investors don't want to deal with dozens of different legal regimes, they want the one that they know about.
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do you work on a cloudflare delaware-awareness project? Delawareness?
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Nope, nothing like it. I'm an Astro maintainer and I work on web frameworks.
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No, it’s not. Companies have to pay taxes where they operate regardless of what state they incorporated in.

Stop spreading populist internet bullshit.

Incorporating in Delaware is like 95% about being in a predictable legal framework for any business related dispute imaginable.

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Uhuh. And in other places, companies are incorporating in Ireland or Luxembourg or other similar tax evasion heavens because of the "predictable legal framework" too. Lol.
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Right, and in other countries they have different laws. In the USA they also pay taxes where they operate. That's how it works.
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Wouldn't it be critical if the agent botched the domain purchase in weird ways ?

Short of throwaway sites (spam etc) it's hard to imagine skimping time on this specific, mostly painless part.

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People are skimping time in every part.

I am watching people who can't code build and deploy dashboards and sites with Claude Code (desktop app - they don't use the CLI), then go cap in hand to developer friends to get it hosted on a domain (rather than some Vercel or whatever URL).

Those people absolutely want to risk letting an agent buy and set up the domain.

This is not necessarily as blindly stupid as you might think. Many of these people know that this workflow is no good for writing code that does anything serious (i.e. storing data for people, taking payments, etc.) but there are a huge number of projects that are just websites, dashboard, data visualisations, etc. with static content and public APIs (Twitter is awash with them) and domains are cheap.

A decent minority of these are even quite cool or interesting.

So a lot of people want to put their vibe-coded weekend project behind a nice domain. Why not?

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If the rest of your deployment flow is via the agent, needing to switch over to a different context and open up a browser and login (or create an account) and buy the domain absolutely is a bump in the road.
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> it's also for things you do rarely and need agents' help

I recently set up DNSSEC for the first time.

It really was just a bunch of copy-paste from one provider to another.

I like to understand what I'm doing, and LLMs helped greatly with that.

But it was copy-pasting screenshots into chat, so not really agentic.

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Last time (after years of doing it manually every once in a while) I just gave codex an ephemeral restricted Cloudflare API Token / key / whatever, the screenshot, and it set up all the records on its own.
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My biggest hesitation with these things is that there is no limit to the possible bill I may receive when the agent goes haywire. Cloudflare doesn’t see this as a problem of course.
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There's a whole payment section in the submitted article which addresses your concern, perhaps you should read it.
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It's not Cloudflare's job to see what you choose to buy as a problem.
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I'd assume they want to limit the number of bills that will get disputed.
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I am curious. Say, cloudflare let's Mr doofus run 4 agents from AI provider X. Those agents go on to create a pyramid scheme, prompted or not(both cases are interesting to me). The agents are running code in infrastructure owned by a third party cloud provider. The law catches up with the bots many years later after people lose a couple million. Who is at fault?

I think cloudflare is in the clear. Mr doofus could argue that the AI company allowed or enabled the crime which they otherwise wouldn't have done. Or Mr doofus could claim his prompts shouldn't have lead to that outcome and that wasn't his intent at all. Making the bots at fault, but not the AI company I guess?

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I’m not saying that you’re wrong.

But it’s worth noting that any good technology starts off being called a toy and with most people not being able to imagine its usefulness.

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Yeah, like blockchain.

(Sorry for the snark, I'm hangry)

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> I am also not sure who Stripe Atlas for.

This was such a weird mention to see in the article. Stripe Atlas is a service that helps new businesses incorporate and onboard onto Stripe/partner services with some startup credits. It's been around forever, has nothing to do with AI, and is generally a very well-respected service.

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I assume the constructive use case is some non-techy person asking ChatGPT.

> Hey, please make me a website about my dog woofy. Give it the link myfluffywoofy.dog ;) Thank you!

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It makes deployment for stuff easier for felix and co.. https://x.com/Etherealize_io/status/2042284300029345910
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> Buying a domain is not something you have to do daily to require any kind of automation.

Which is arguably unfortunate, as it nudges people towards using centralized services because they simply don't know that they have the option to register one.

For example, why not self-host a single-page party invitation site designed by an agent rather than using Facebook or Instagram?

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A lot of what enabled Web 1.0 was how easy it was for an average web user to create his own website.

An average web user got far less technical since, and making a website got harder instead.

Now, if anyone could just ask an AI agent to set up a website, and get a personal page with an e-mail inbox and a domain - all reasonably secure, TLS set up, billing added as +$5 per year to the AI subscription bundle? Maybe that would help some.

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Yes, this is exactly my hope too. Many hacker/cypherpunk ideas failed or never reached wide adoption because they were just too complicated for regular people: GPG/web of trust, self-hosting websites and email, having your own custom software for personal tasks…

Instead, everybody ended up using Gmail, iMessage/WhatsApp, and Facebook, and things are as centralized as they can be.

Agents could be a force in breaking that trend. Even if inference stays centralized, the artifacts agents create would not be. Basically the difference between everybody renting from one of a handful apartment building mega corps or being able to hire contractors to build your own things according to your ideas.

And just like there, it’ll probably help a lot to know a bit about how the sausage is made to not be taken advantage of. Also, many people will probably always continue to rent, which is fine. But the possibility of agent competition alone will hopefully keep centralized platforms and SaaS offerings on their toes, which is good for their users.

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The problem is not website, the problem is discovery and discovery is on Instagram, TikTok, and social networks. You don't have any incentive to build a website for a regular audience. What you might do is build an audience on a social network and then try to move them to a website.

But at that point you're big enough to build it properly.

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> to what end?

People making cooking websites, websites for their garden, etc usually have nowhere to go. A web app who is an agent for a customer will then deploy agents in the backend to deploy the website too.

Basically what one would do manually, you tell one agent to make another agent do it.

Meta agents are where are going it seems.

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> People making cooking websites, websites for their garden, etc usually have nowhere to go.

They've had WYSIWYG website builders since the late 1990s.

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They don't have anymore. At least not since Artisteer shut down.
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> People making cooking websites, websites for their garden, etc usually have nowhere to go.

You know, I kind of miss Geocities too.

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Sadly they will be publishing on a web which has no human readers anymore because it’s been crowded out by 5 trillion AI slop gardening websites. And the only visitors will be other AI scraper bots.

Any actual readers will be on platforms which combat the bot spam.

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While large social media sites have captured lots of traffic, etc. I've had small websites for a local wargaming club, a very modest blog, etc. for decades requiring little or no technical expertise.

The idea that people who want modest websites need active agentic systems to do that is a really odd take.

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This when their web GUI only allows buying one domain name at a time.
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A lot of good and interesting things started out as toys

We should build more toys

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I don't think there are a lot in the SAAS world. Usually when something quirky and new launches, readers on this website can discern something about useful intent.

Arguably Github, Slack, Twitch, TikTok were basically toys at launch with a lot of people questioning possible market fit.

But there is a difference between those products - and for example - everything that came out of the crypto blockchain scene. This new product by Cloudflare feels more in the latter camp than the former.

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> I've have personally never seen a good example where a cross vendor account provisioning actually working.

At enterprise level, account provisioning with SCIM is the industry standard.

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> 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.

Every time I come across AI projects and AI integrations (including my previous job where I full-time worked on one), no one was able to show me concrete examples how can I use it for constructive things.

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> It is cool feature but to what end?

Doesn’t this sum up most of the AI “innovations” we’ve seen shoveled in this bubble?

We constantly see AI thought leaders backpeddling on promises and just spouting general nonsense. Altman originally talked effusively about an era of “abundance”. An abundance of what? It’s a word salad of feel good vibes without any substance.

Sam Altman has gone from claiming AI might cure cancer to shoveling ads and the scope of AI seems to be reduced to mostly be suitable as flawed, imperfect, but mildly useful coding/automation agents that are likely subsidized beyond economic viability, but you can’t point that out because it’s the future!

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It's a sales tool.

You can tell Claude to add a new condition to an if and instead it will duplicate the whole if body.

They're hoping you'll tell your "agent" to buy a domain and it will buy 30 instead.

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> it is a toy and they do not know who and how they will use it.

Just like it is usually used: spam and (D)DoS

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> Buying a domain is not something you have to do daily to require any kind of automation

I wrote a python client for dnsimple nearly 16 years ago to exactly that. If you can’t think of a reason it’s useful, you may wish to get your agent to buy a domain for some project you have asked to create.

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> 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.

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It offers value to parasites who buy domains and resell them?
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Cloudflare gets a cut though, so it's valuable. As long as number go up, all good
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Cloudflare operates as an at-cost registrar. They charge wholesale prices for domains.

What cut are you talking about?

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They may be wrong on that particular point, but Cloudflare definitely profits from increased crime as it drives increased sales of Cloudflare's security products. There are rumors they even knowingly help protect DDoS botnets because they benefit from there being more DDoS.
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It's not like there aren't others who sell domains with an API. This doesn't change that much.
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So actively making the internet worse. Awesome.
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Hasn’t all that been automated by people for decades anyway?

I guess this, lowers the barrier to entry for this extremely specific niche?

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And that goes back way further than AI. We were doing some crazy stuff at Demand Media with enom and all their fake content sites.
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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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lol, there are lots of people who aren't developers.
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