Bot Management

Cloudflare · Aug 31, 2026

Introducing Adaptive Intelligence: undermining the economics of every bot attack

Cloudflare introduces Adaptive Intelligence, a bot detection engine designed for attackers who distribute requests across proxies, vary fingerprints, and continually test defenses. It argues that deterministic, rule-based systems create stationary targets: attackers receive repeated yes-or-no feedback while defenders update on slower release cycles, making adaptation economically cheaper for attackers. The engine changes this dynamic through continuously retrained machine learning, statistical rather than fixed judgments, and planned disposable rules that appear and retire at random intervals; it also learns from corrections and misses across millions of sites. Its first component, continuous retraining of the machine-learning system behind bot score, is launching now, while disposable rule generation and broader traffic learning are described as forthcoming, with Enterprise customers enabling “Auto Update Machine Learning” to receive it.