{"slug": "cloudflare-fights-bots-with-bots-via-continuously-retraining-ai-defense", "title": "Cloudflare fights bots with bots via continuously retraining AI defense", "summary": "Cloudflare launched Adaptive Intelligence, a continuously retraining AI defense built into its Bot Management product, claiming it analyzes over a trillion web visits daily to instantly counter automated attacks. The vendor said bot traffic accounted for 4.2% of HTML requests in 2025 and that automated bots generate roughly 57% of all web requests today. Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht said the system creates a moving target to flip the economics on attackers.", "body_md": "Cloudflare continues its onslaught against bots with an automated defense offering it claims can react to attacks “instantly.”\n\nDubbed Adaptive Intelligence, the continuous detection engine is built directly into Cloudflare’s [Bot Management](https://www.cloudflare.com/products/bot-management/) security product. The vendor boldly claims it analyzes “more than a trillion web visits every day” to spot automated attacks as they unfold.\n\n“Building taller walls fails when the cost of scaling an attack is effectively zero,” Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht said. “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.”\n\nAI bot traffic is on the rise, and so to are automated attacks. Cloudflare’s own [yearly review](https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/cloudflares-yearly-review-shows-more-incidents-and-higher-ai-bot-activity/) showed bot traffic accounted for 4.2% of HTML requests in 2025, while the vendor [said in July](https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/cloudflare-now-studies-your-mouse-clicks-in-captcha-bot-gambit/) automated bot traffic generates roughly 57% of all web requests today.\n\nBut that same means for indexing and AI training is also being employed by threat actors to employ increasingly sophisticated attacks. Reports from both [Google](https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/google-report-exposes-ways-threat-actors-use-ai-to-speed-up-attacks/) and [Nokia](https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/nokia-report-shows-ai-data-demands-effectively-fund-ddos-attacks/) show that AI-induced circumventions are being employed, while Russian and Chinese actor making use of the technology for [espionage campaigns](https://www.sdxcentral.com/analysis/how-threat-actors-are-really-using-ai/).\n\nCloudflare’s latest innovation to battle the bots uses a machine learning model that “retrains continuously” on live traffic to uncover bypass techniques. It also generates hyper-targeted rules for blocking specific threats that prevent attackers from mapping defenses.\n\n“Adaptive Intelligence acts like a single, constantly learning brain,” a Cloudflare press release claimed, adding that customers can use the product to analyze multi-timeframe behavior patterns simultaneously to catch low-and-slow threats, like slow credential stuffing and scraping campaigns.\n\nThe launch is the latest in a growing number of security-centric products from Cloudflare.\n\nIn July, it unveiled [Precursor](https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/cloudflare-now-studies-your-mouse-clicks-in-captcha-bot-gambit/), which analyzes interactions across an entire user session on the client side in a bid to beat bots attempting to beat CAPTCHA tests. A month prior, Cloudflare debuted a new [privacy standard co-developed with browser giants](https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/cloudflare-forms-pact-with-browser-giants-to-protect-your-privacy-with-tokens/) aimed at reducing bot fraud using anonymous cryptographic tokens.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cloudflare-fights-bots-with-bots-via-continuously-retraining-ai-defense", "canonical_source": "https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/cloudflare-fights-bots-with-bots-via-continuously-retraining-ai-defense/", "published_at": "2026-09-01 15:26:16+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-01 15:56:08.675167+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "machine-learning", "ai-products", "ai-safety"], "entities": ["Cloudflare", "Dane Knecht", "Adaptive Intelligence", "Bot Management", "Precursor", "Google", "Nokia"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cloudflare-fights-bots-with-bots-via-continuously-retraining-ai-defense", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cloudflare-fights-bots-with-bots-via-continuously-retraining-ai-defense.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cloudflare-fights-bots-with-bots-via-continuously-retraining-ai-defense.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cloudflare-fights-bots-with-bots-via-continuously-retraining-ai-defense.jsonld"}}