Cloudflare launches wallets and identity controls for AI agents

Cloudflare launched identity and payment infrastructure for AI agents on August 4, 2026, introducing Cloudflare Wallets and cloudflare.pay in San Francisco. The products aim to give agents stable identity and controlled purchasing power within guardrails set by their human operators.

How Agent Identity Works

Each Cloudflare account receives a unique web address that serves as a stable identifier for AI agents operating under that account. Businesses can extend this identity to specific agents, allowing them to see which agent authorized any given request. This identity layer runs through Cloudflare's infrastructure, creating an audit trail tied to authentication.

Wallet Architecture and Controls

The system uses a two-tier wallet model. An Account Wallet functions as a central balance pool, while Virtual Wallets assigned to individual agents include concrete spending controls: per-agent spending caps, approved merchant lists, and maximum transaction sizes per transaction.

These controls live in Cloudflare's AI Gateway, the company's traffic management layer for AI workloads. Starting August 5, 2026, identity-aware controls became available in the gateway. When traffic reaches AI Gateway through an Access-protected custom domain, the system uses the authenticated user's Access identity in logs, analytics, routing, and spend controls—without requiring developers to pass user IDs from the client application.

Enterprise Use Cases

This architecture targets enterprises deploying multiple agents with different permission levels. Features include the ability to set spend limits by authenticated user, control which gateways different users can access, filter logs by user, and build policies that bind spending to identity rather than relying on client-side tokens.

The release positions Cloudflare as an infrastructure provider for the operational layer of agent deployment—focusing on what agents can actually do with money and identity, rather than on agent reasoning or decision-making itself.

What's Next

The August rollout marks the shipping of both Cloudflare Wallets and the identity-aware AI Gateway features. Both are now available to Cloudflare customers with AI Gateway access.