Matthew Prince proposes cutting AI agent crawl load before pricing access

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says agent traffic already exceeds human traffic on Cloudflare and could reach 1,000 times human traffic within five years.

Speaking at Cloudflare Connect 2026, he proposes "reduce the load first, then price what remains." As part of that, he says OpenAI should fetch only changed pages and compensate publishers when agents use their content.

The proposal is Prince's, reported from his remarks at the conference. The source report does not describe any agreement or implementation by OpenAI.