Agents move to production

Cloudflare said on April 13 it is expanding Agent Cloud so artificial intelligence agents can run as long-lived production services, not just developer demos. (cloudflare.com) An artificial intelligence agent is software that can remember context, call tools, and take multi-step actions over time instead of answering one prompt and stopping. Cloudflare’s Agents documentation says each agent runs on a Durable Object, a stateful micro-server with its own storage and lifecycle. (developers.cloudflare.com) Cloudflare said the new push is built to support “millions of autonomous, long-running agents” on its network. The company said the package combines infrastructure, security, and developer tools aimed at moving workloads from laptops into production. (cloudflare.com) The core design is meant to cut the cost of keeping agents alive between tasks. Cloudflare says each agent instance gets its own SQLite database, can hibernate when idle, and can wake on demand for messages, schedules, or webhooks. (workers.cloudflare.com) The company is also emphasizing the controls that enterprises usually ask for after pilots start breaking. Cloudflare’s AI Gateway product says it provides logs, analytics, rate limiting, caching, retries, and model fallback so teams can see what agents are doing and keep them within cost and reliability limits. (cloudflare.com) That marks a change from the first wave of agent tools, which centered on chatbots and coding assistants running in isolated sessions. Cloudflare said the market is now moving toward agents that read context, reason across steps, and keep working in the background for each user or employee. (cloudflare.com) Cloudflare is building this on Workers and Durable Objects, products it has spent years using for stateful and distributed applications. Its Durable Objects documentation describes them as a building block for chat, real-time coordination, and other applications that need shared state without separate infrastructure. (developers.cloudflare.com) The company has also been widening the model layer beneath those agents. In November 2025, Cloudflare said it had agreed to acquire Replicate so developers on Workers could access a broader catalog of artificial intelligence models through the same platform. (cloudflare.com) Cloudflare Chief Executive Matthew Prince said “agents need a home that is secure by default, scales to millions instantly, and persists across long-running tasks.” The bet is that companies buying agent software in 2026 will pay less attention to demos and more attention to uptime, control, and audit trails. (cloudflare.com)