New real-time detection engine continuously rewrites its own defenses to prevent attackers from establishing a lasting foothold
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the leading connectivity cloud company, today announced Adaptive Intelligence, a new continuous detection engine built directly into Cloudflare Bot Management. Powered by insights from trillions of requests across Cloudflare’s massive global network, Adaptive Intelligence autonomously learns from the meta-signals of live traffic, generating short-lived rules that make automated attacks far too expensive and time-consuming to continually launch. Organizations will now have access to a powerful detection engine built to adapt and react instantly when threat actors breach their defenses.
Launching an automated cyberattack used to require advanced engineering skills, but modern AI and cheap online tools have made it simple and inexpensive to carry out. Today, nearly anyone with a modest budget can easily rent networks of compromised devices, mask their location behind real home Internet addresses, and use free software that mimics basic human behavior. This creates a deeply unfair battle for online businesses. While attackers can try endless, low-cost attempts until they succeed, security teams still have to stop every threat instantly without accidentally blocking a real visitor or customer. Compounding the problem, traditional security tools still rely on slow, scheduled updates that can take weeks or months to deploy—leaving businesses defenseless against modern threat actors who change their tactics in a matter of hours, and in some cases, minutes.
“Building taller walls fails when the cost of scaling an attack is effectively zero. To stop modern bot threats, you have to flip the economics on the attackers. Traditional defenses offer a static target that threat actors can systematically solve. Cloudflare’s Adaptive Intelligence creates a moving target—rendering an attacker’s engineering efforts obsolete before their operation can ever achieve scale,” said Dane Knecht, CTO at Cloudflare.
Unlike conventional bot mitigation products that rely on fixed updates, Cloudflare’s Adaptive Intelligence acts like a single, constantly learning brain. By analyzing more than a trillion web visits every day to spot new threats as they happen, customers can:
- Implement Always-On Defense: Cloudflare’s ML model retrains continuously on live traffic, integrating new bot frameworks and bypass techniques into the detection engine in real time instead of waiting for manual updates or scheduled releases.
- Force Attackers to Start Over Every Time: Adaptive Intelligence automatically generates short-lived, hyper-targeted rules to block specific threats. Rotating rules prevents attackers from studying the system, mapping defenses, or making lasting progress.
- Catch Stealthy Attacks: Now customers can analyze multi-timeframe behavior patterns simultaneously to catch low-and-slow threats—like slow credential stuffing and scraping campaigns—that easily hide from traditional defenses.
- Spot Malicious Intent Without Blocking Real Humans: By combining browser-level session behavior signals from Cloudflare Precursor with global edge telemetry, the multi-layered architecture will be able to evaluate automation and abuse beyond basic binary tests.
- Deploy Upgrades Safely and Autonomously: Security updates automatically test themselves against live traffic behind the scenes, verifying accuracy and deterring false positives before deployment with zero downtime.
To learn more, please check out the resources below:
- Blog: Introducing Adaptive Intelligence: undermining the economics of every bot attack.
- Cloudflare Bot Management
About Cloudflare
Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET) is the leading connectivity cloud company. It empowers organizations to make their employees, applications and networks faster and more secure everywhere, while reducing complexity and cost. Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud delivers the most full-featured, unified platform of cloud-native products and developer tools, so any organization can gain the control they need to work, develop, and accelerate their business.
Powered by one of the world’s largest and most interconnected networks, Cloudflare blocks billions of threats online for its customers every day. It is trusted by millions of organizations – from the largest brands to entrepreneurs and small businesses to nonprofits, humanitarian groups, and governments across the globe.
Learn more about Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud at cloudflare.com/connectivity-cloud. Learn more about the latest Internet trends and insights at https://radar.cloudflare.com.
Follow us: Blog | X | LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, which statements involve substantial risks and uncertainties. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements because they contain words such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “expect,” “explore,” “plan,” “anticipate,” “could,” “intend,” “target,” “project,” “contemplate,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “potential,” or “continue,” or the negative of these words, or other similar terms or expressions that concern Cloudflare’s expectations, strategy, plans, or intentions. However, not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. Forward-looking statements expressed or implied in this press release include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the capabilities and effectiveness of Cloudflare’s Adaptive Intelligence and Cloudflare’s other products and technology, the benefits to Cloudflare’s customers from using Cloudflare’s Adaptive Intelligence and Cloudflare’s other products and technology or any of its related features will be developed and available in beta form, or generally available, to all current and potential Cloudflare customers, Cloudflare’s technological development, future operations, growth, initiatives, or strategies, and comments made by Cloudflare’s Chief Technology Officer and others. Actual results could differ materially from those stated or implied in forward-looking statements due to a number of factors, including but not limited to, risks detailed in Cloudflare’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), including Cloudflare’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q filed on August 6, 2026, as well as other filings that Cloudflare may make from time to time with the SEC.
The forward-looking statements made in this press release relate only to events as of the date on which the statements are made. Cloudflare undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements made in this press release to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this press release or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law. Cloudflare may not actually achieve the plans, intentions, or expectations disclosed in Cloudflare’s forward-looking statements, and you should not place undue reliance on Cloudflare’s forward-looking statements.
© 2026 Cloudflare, Inc. All rights reserved. Cloudflare, the Cloudflare logo, and other Cloudflare marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Cloudflare, Inc. in the U.S. and other jurisdictions. All other marks and names referenced herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Contacts
Cloudflare, Inc.
Daniella Vallurupalli
Vice President, Head of Global Communications
press@cloudflare.com
