Cloudflare shares soar thanks to the success of Alien AI assistant. Is it worth buying them?

The shares of cybersecurity solutions provider Cloudflare had an unexpected rally this week: they jumped 18% in two days. The company's technologies suddenly turned out to be important for the work of Moltbot, an AI agent gaining popularity on the Internet, and for data protection in this case, MarketWatch writes. While Moltbot doesn't directly generate revenue for Cloudflare, the company could still benefit from the situation, analysts say.

Shares of Cloudflare rose 8.8% on Tuesday, January 27, continuing the surge a day earlier, when the price rose 9.2%. The catalyst for the stock's rise was the dramatically popular AI assistant Moltbot. Although there is no direct link between it and Cloudflare, the attention to the bot has also attracted interest in the company, which specializes in cybersecurity and cloud services, Barron's wrote.

Moltbot is an open-source AI assistant based on the Claude chatbot from AI startup Anthropic. Users download it from GitHub and install it for voice control of their inbox, calendars, and even to help with check-in for flights, MarketWatch writes. Moltbot runs on users' local devices and integrates with messengers like Apple's iMessage and Meta's WhatsApp. Apple, for example, intended to add similar features to its Siri voice assistant after integrating it with Google's AI.

While Cloudflare is not directly connected to Moltbot, the AI bot's access to email, calendars and browser history poses cybersecurity risks, said RBC Capital Markets analyst Matthew Hedberg. He is quoted by MarketWatch.

"An AI agent running locally on a device cannot and should not have access to everything a user does - as identity control is critical to protecting the agent and managing its access," Hedberg wrote.

On social media, Moltbot supporters, including a user who identified himself as a Cloudflare developer, advised each other to set up Cloudflare Tunnel, a solution that allows local resources to connect to Cloudflare without using a public IP address, Barron's reported.

In addition, Moltbot uses only local infrastructure to work without a connection to a remote cloud, which requires processing data closer to its source (edge computing), Hedberg added. And Cloudflare just provides Workers, a platform on which agents like Moltbot can operate securely, MarketWatch writes. "Most people don't think of Cloudflare as an edge compute company, but they are," Fusion Collective IT director Blake Crawford told the publication.

"While AI tools such as Claude Code, Cowork, Clawdbot and others are unlikely to be revenue drivers for Cloudflare in the short term, we believe the further proliferation of AI agents plays to the advantage of Cloudflare and its Workers platform," Barron's quoted Hedberg's note as saying.

"Cloudflare is seen as an infrastructure provider for AI agents," said Mizuho trading analyst Daniel O'Regan in a note cited by Barron's. - I think the connection here is more emotional than economic: Clawdbot doesn't generate tangible revenue directly for Cloudflare." But Cloudflare itself is positioning itself as an edge-computing solution for customers, and Moltbot's growing popularity strengthens its position, Barron's explains.

Moltbot came just in time for Cloudflare: the company's stock lost 32% between the beginning of November 2025 and the beginning of this week, writes Barron's. In addition, at the end of last year, the cloud service faced two outages that left a significant part of the Internet temporarily without access to Cloudflare's services.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor