FILE PHOTO: A logo of CLOUDFLARE sits outside the company's house on the opening day of the 55th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, January 20, 2025. REUTERS/Yves Herman/File Photo
Jan 27 (Reuters) - Cloudflare shares surged about 14% premarket on Tuesday as social media buzz around the "Clawdbot" AI agent rekindled investor enthusiasm for the company's tools that help run the technology.
Developers building with Clawdbot, which is based on Anthropic's Claude, use Cloudflare's low-latency infrastructure to securely connect with the agent and run it locally on devices, enabling autonomous task execution.
Clawdbot drew thousands of GitHub stars and trended online over the weekend, feeding hopes that "agentic" AI, systems designed to execute tasks autonomously rather than simply answer prompts, is moving beyond demos toward broader, real-world use and could fuel the next leg of the AI rally.
Cloudflare's globally distributed edge network and consumption-based pricing model position it to benefit as AI agents scale up.
The San Francisco-based company is scheduled to report earnings on February 10, when investors will be watching closely for signs that AI-related activity is translating into increased traffic and revenue.
"As agentic tools like Clawdbot scale (making more API calls, hitting more websites, generating more traffic), we believe NET is positioned to capture that activity," Wolfe Research analyst Joshua Tilton said.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told analysts on the company's third-quarter earnings call in October that Cloudflare estimates about 80% of leading AI companies already rely on its infrastructure.
"The agents of the future will inherently have to pass through our network and abide by its rules," he said.
(Reporting by Harshita Mary Varghese in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid)
