After announcing the launch of Cloudflare.Wallets and Cloudflare.Pay, the connectivity cloud company has now announced the launch of Cloudflare OS, an open source AI workspace running on Cloudflare’s global network.
The company in its press announcement stated – Cloudflare OS will give every employee a secure workspace equipped with AI tools and access to internal compatony systems, without requiring new infrastructure or months of custom development.
“Cloudflare OS is how we run Cloudflare. For AI to truly transform an enterprise, it can’t live in a silo or behind a developer bottleneck. Every employee needs the ability to build, iterate, and automate safely. Our employees get AI tools connected to the systems they actually use, and security isn’t something IT has to bolt on afterward,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “We built this because nothing else did what we needed. Now any company can start from where it took us years to get.”
The OS aims to provide every employee with a secure workspace that is equipped with AI tools and easy access to internal systems, without new infrastructure or a long pipeline of custom development. Accessible directly through the browser without needing developer expertise, with Cloudflare OS employees get an agent workspace for themselves. This agent can conduct research, produce documents tied to live data, or even run automated workflows in the background, without a development or an IT team.
Built on Cloudflare Access, this OS is zero trust by default, verifying every request and user before access is granted. All of the AI agents start with zero permissions and are given access only to the specific needed tasks. Gatekeepers, the governed connectors of the OS, give owners with precise control over what the AI can see, change, and also when a human sign off is needed for an action to go through.
Without a developer, any output can become a working app with its isolated database, real-time capabilities, and access controls. The app can also be used by colleagues or can even be adapted to the employee’s needs. Through the AI Gateway, organisations can use any AI model provider, who are not locked to one vendor.
There is clear visibility for administrators as well on what is being spent – broken down by person, team or even app. The administrators also have the independence to set spending limits, rate limits or even route routine tasks to smaller, affordable models.
While AI tools have an understanding of the world around, there is no knowledge that any tool would have on how a specific company operates – its internal systems, ways teams actually get work done, or approval processes. Thus, while building enterprise AI tools, organisations need to start from scratch, with employees training the systems with basic context.
Cloudflare stated, building a tailored alternative is no small project; a platform with proper security and real integration into internal systems can take years to develop and cost millions to maintain.
“In the meantime, employees find workarounds, IT loses track of which AI tools are running and who is using them, and costs pile up with little to show for it. Cloudflare OS starts from a different premise: a company captures its knowledge, processes, and ways of working once in a form AI can actually execute, and that knowledge travels with every employee’s workspace from day one,” the press statement said.
Cloudflare is collaborating with leading global systems integrators to customize the platform for complex, unique customer environments. These partners build directly on Cloudflare’s infrastructure to tailor Cloudflare OS to specific industry requirements, existing tech stacks, and custom compliance needs.
“Security and governance can no longer be an afterthought when deploying autonomous agents and internal AI tools. By grounding Cloudflare OS in Cloudflare’s Zero Trust network and capability-based security model, Cloudflare has created a standard for safe enterprise execution. We are proud to join the Cloudflare OS launch to help organizations curate context, deploy Gatekeepers, and deploy enterprise-grade AI applications safely,” said Matt Weinberg, co-founder and president at Happy Cog.
Today, Cloudflare OS is available now through Cloudflare’s open-source repository. Soon organizations will be able to access Cloudflare OS directly through Cloudflare or work with a select group of global implementation partners—including Presidio, Happy Cog and others, to tailor the deployment to their specific environment.
Building AI infrastructure directly on top of specialised operating systems is rapidly catching up across the industry. VAST Data too had announced its own AI OS a few months ago – joining a growing movement to abstract complex hardware and data layers for AI development.
While both VAST Data’s and Cloudflare’s AI operating systems share the fundamental goal of unifying AI workloads, simplifying development, and embedding robust data security directly into the platform, they differ drastically in their architectural focus. VAST Data’s AI OS acts as a massive backend data foundation built for exabyte-scale GPU clusters and heavy model training pipelines, whereas Cloudflare OS serves as a user-facing, serverless productivity workspace designed to let employees safely run agents and build micro-apps.
