Building Trusted AI at Scale Cities Startups & Digital Sovereignty – Keynote Matthew Prince Cloudflare
20 Feb 2026 13:00h - 14:00h
Building Trusted AI at Scale Cities Startups & Digital Sovereignty – Keynote Matthew Prince Cloudflare
Summary
At the India AI Summit, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince outlined a vision for the future of artificial intelligence, drawing parallels with the historic diffusion of the printing press ([2-5][7-15]). He argued that, like Gutenberg’s invention, AI should not be confined to a handful of firms but instead be distributed among hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide ([24-26]). Prince emphasized five guiding principles: decentralizing AI ownership, ensuring creators are fairly compensated, empowering small businesses-especially in the global South-against consolidation, preserving cultural and linguistic diversity, and making the technology affordable for the poorest users ([24-42][44-48]). He warned that the current internet revenue model based on human traffic is collapsing, citing the decline in Google-driven visits from one per two pages to one per thirty, and noting that AI providers now scrape millions of pages for each visitor they return ([73-86][87-89]). Because “human eyeball traffic” is disappearing, Prince called for a new business model that rewards creators for advancing knowledge rather than generating click-bait, proposing a system that fills the “holes” in humanity’s collective understanding ([94-103][108-112]). He cautioned that without such reforms, AI could become as centralized as past telecom and social-network monopolies, concentrating power in five dominant firms instead of the desired 500,000 ([113-118]). Positioning Cloudflare as a neutral infrastructure provider, Prince noted that the company operates in over 120 countries, handles more than 20 % of global internet traffic, and is used by over 80 % of leading AI firms despite not being an AI company itself ([56-63][64-66]). To promote the five principles, Cloudflare is deploying top AI models on its global network so they run locally, simplifying access for users without deep technical expertise ([124-128]). The firm also funds education through a large Indian startup accelerator, offers free credits to emerging AI projects, and has launched “AI for Bharat,” a multilingual model supporting 22 Indian languages ([129-138]). Security-by-design and cost-efficiency are highlighted as essential, with Cloudflare working to reduce the massive budgets traditionally required to build AI services ([141-147]). Prince challenged the audience to adopt these values, urging policymakers, businesses, and civil society to create an inclusive AI economy that is not limited to a few companies in a single location ([148-152]). He concluded by expressing optimism that, with coordinated effort, AI can enhance humanity, protect cultural uniqueness, and become universally accessible ([39-42][49-51]). The speech underscored that the AI ecosystem stands at a crossroads, requiring immediate action to avoid consolidation and to establish new, knowledge-focused compensation mechanisms ([52-53][90-96]). Ultimately, Prince’s message was that democratizing AI infrastructure and rewarding genuine knowledge creation are critical for a fair and sustainable digital future ([44-48][108-112]).
Keypoints
Major discussion points
– Democratizing AI and preventing concentration in a few hands – Prince argues that AI should be “distributed, not controlled” and that the ecosystem must involve “500,000 companies… spread around the world” rather than a handful of dominant players [24-26][118-119][150-152].
– Creating sustainable business models that compensate creators – He stresses that the current AI paradigm “takes but does not give back” and calls for new models that reward journalists, academics, and researchers for generating knowledge instead of merely driving traffic [27-31][90-97][101-104][112].
– Ensuring inclusion of small businesses and the Global South while preserving cultural diversity – Prince highlights the risk that AI could become a “consolidator” that marginalizes small enterprises, especially in developing regions, and warns against “Americanizing” the world, urging AI to respect local languages and identities [32-38][40-42][120-122].
– Cloudflare’s role as an enabler and broker for a fair AI ecosystem – He outlines how Cloudflare leverages its global network to make AI models locally available, funds education and accelerators, and builds secure-by-design, region-specific services (e.g., AI for Bharat) to lower entry barriers [56-63][124-138][141-147].
– Addressing the risk of centralization and calling for coordinated policy action – The speech warns that without deliberate effort, AI could repeat historical patterns of “telecoms… social networks… hyperscalers” consolidating power, and urges governments, businesses, and civil society to act together to achieve the five outlined goals [53-55][113-118][71-73].
Overall purpose / goal of the discussion
Prince’s talk is a policy-oriented call-to-action that frames a five-point framework for the future of AI: (1) broad distribution of the technology, (2) fair compensation for content creators, (3) support for small businesses and the Global South, (4) preservation of cultural diversity, and (5) universal accessibility. He positions Cloudflare as a neutral infrastructure broker that can help realize this vision while urging all stakeholders to adopt these principles in shaping AI policy and business practice.
Tone of the discussion
The tone begins historical and reflective, using the printing press analogy to set an optimistic vision. It then shifts to cautiously critical, highlighting risks of centralization, loss of creator value, and exclusion of the Global South. The remainder of the speech adopts a constructive and hopeful tone, detailing concrete steps Cloudflare is taking and ending with an encouraging call for collective action. Overall, the delivery moves from reverent storytelling to urgent advocacy, ending on an upbeat, collaborative note.
Speakers
– Speaker 1
– Role/Title: Event moderator / host (introducing the keynote) [S1]
– Area of Expertise:
– Matthew Prince
– Role/Title: CEO and Co-founder, Cloudflare; former professor of history [S4][S6]
– Area of Expertise: Internet infrastructure, cloud services, AI policy, technology democratization
Additional speakers:
– (none)
Matthew Prince opened his keynote by thanking the audience and the AI Summit hosts, noting his honour at speaking in India and hinting at a follow-up appearance in Geneva [2-4][155-156]. He framed his remarks as a historical reflection, recalling his former role as a history teacher and arguing that studying past technological revolutions can illuminate the path forward [5-6].
Using Gutenberg’s printing press as an analogy, Prince explained that the press originated near Mainz, Germany and spread within sixty years to dozens of European cities-including Paris, Rome, the Netherlands, Spain and London-through itinerant technicians who set up local workshops with regional investors [7-15]. Because the press was not centrally controlled, no single nation could gate-keep or suppress it [7-15]. He argued that this decentralized diffusion made the press a “once-in-a-lifetime” catalyst for societal improvement, and that today’s AI era represents a comparable turning point [18-19].
From this perspective Prince introduced a five-point framework for AI development:
1. Distribution – AI should be “distributed, not controlled,” with ownership spread across roughly 500 000 firms worldwide rather than a handful of giants [24-30].
2. Creator enablement – Business models must ensure that journalists, academics and researchers are fairly compensated for their work instead of having it merely harvested by AI systems [27-31][90-97].
3. Support for small enterprises – The ecosystem should empower small businesses and entrepreneurs, especially in the Global South, so AI does not become a consolidating force that erodes personal relationships and local commerce [32-38][120-122].
4. Cultural and linguistic diversity – AI must preserve regional identities and avoid an “Americanising” homogenisation [35-38].
5. Universal affordability – AI should be affordable and accessible to the poorest users, not locked behind expensive subscriptions [40-42]; the underlying business model must allow AI to reach the broadest set of users [148-152].
Prince warned that the traditional internet revenue model-driven by human “eyeball” traffic that fuels advertising and subscriptions-is collapsing. He cited data showing Google’s efficiency falling from one visitor per two pages scraped a decade ago to one visitor per thirty pages today, while AI providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic now scrape thousands of pages for each visitor they return [73-86][87-89]. This shift threatens the historic traffic-based monetisation that once sustained the web [81-85].
To address this, Prince proposed a new reward system that values the creation of knowledge-advancing content rather than click-bait. He likened human knowledge to a block of Swiss cheese, where the “holes” represent gaps in human knowledge; AI companies are willing to pay to fill those gaps, aligning incentives between AI firms and society [101-104][108-112]. This model would shift compensation from sheer traffic metrics toward contributions that genuinely expand collective understanding [94-103].
Prince cautioned that without deliberate action AI could repeat the centralisation patterns seen in telecommunications, social networks and hyperscalers, concentrating power in a few dominant firms-he warned it must not be “restricted to literally five companies in one postal code in San Francisco” [113-118]. He called for coordinated policy, business and civil-society efforts to prevent this consolidation and to ensure that AI remains a globally distributed resource [53-55][71-73].
Positioning Cloudflare as a neutral broker, Prince highlighted the company’s extensive infrastructure-operating in over 120 countries, handling more than 20 % of global internet traffic, and serving over 80 % of leading AI firms-while noting that Cloudflare does not develop AI models [56-63][64-66][70-73]. Leveraging this network, which spans more than 300 cities, Cloudflare is deploying leading AI models at the edge so they run locally in users’ cities, simplifying access for those without deep technical expertise [124-128]. The firm has also regionalised models to respect local laws, languages and cultures, exemplified by “AI for Bharat,” which supports 22 Indian languages and is available to students and startups [136-138].
Further, Cloudflare runs a large Indian startup accelerator, provides free credits for emerging AI projects, and organises hackathons such as the IIT “build-a-thon” to foster local talent [129-140]. The company emphasises “security-by-design,” noting that the original internet was built without security in mind and that AI systems must be built securely from the ground up [141-147]. It also argues that future AI providers should not require trillion-dollar budgets or nuclear-scale infrastructure, but instead operate on affordable, efficient systems [141-147].
Prince concluded by urging all stakeholders-governments, businesses, and civil society-to adopt the five values of distribution, creator enablement, support for small enterprises, cultural preservation and universal access. He reiterated that AI should accelerate humanity, not diminish it, and expressed confidence that, with collective effort, AI can enhance humanity rather than erode it [84-86][155-156].
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mr. Matthew Prince, CEO, Cloudflare.
Thank you. Thank you. It’s an honor to be here at India’s AI Summit, and I look forward to what we’ll be doing in Geneva next year. I know that here I’m supposed to be talking about the future, but forgive me for a second. I used to be a professor, sometimes teaching history. And so I think sometimes in order for us to understand the future, it’s actually good for us to understand some of the past. The past we start with and what the previous speakers were talking about was another technological marvel, which was the birth of the printing press. The printing press started as transformative technology built in Germany, just outside of Mainz. And it was, though not held there, not contained there, but spread incredibly quickly across the whole.
Of Europe, expanding not so that it was in any one place, but. to a thousand cities within less than 60 years, which at that time was remarkable. It started in Germany, but it was never just a German thing. By 1470, there were presses in Paris, Rome. By 1473, the Netherlands and Spain. By 1476, in London. German technicians who learned from Gutenberg literally walked across Europe with that knowledge and shared it across all of Europe. And they would set up a shop in a new city, find a local investor, a merchant or a bishop, and then start printing local laws, local languages, local cultures. And because the technology was not centrally controlled, no single country could gatekeep it or shut it down.
This was one of those once -in -a -lifetime moments where technology spread and the world got better as a result. And I think today that is that turning point that we are now. And so inspired by the Honorable Prime Minister’s words yesterday, I thought I would frame what I would think of. As a framework of five things that we should all be playing for. And I think we can almost all agree that these things, if AI delivers them, will be better than if it doesn’t. So the first is. Much like the printing press, this should not be a technology which is controlled by five companies. It should be 500 ,000 companies, and those companies should be spread around the world.
We need to make sure that, as the honorable prime minister said, we democratize this technology and make it available for everyone and anyone. Secondly, we need to make sure that we’re building business models around this technology. Too often today in the early times of AI, AI takes but it does not give back. We need to make sure that content creators, that journalists, that academics, that researchers are able to be compensated for the hard work that they do to create their content, rather than just having that content taken, regurgitated, and spit back through AI systems. And this is one of the key challenges that we have to think about as we go forward. We also need to make sure that what has thrived in the early Internet, small businesses, individual entrepreneurs, the global South being able to ship to the world, that that needs to be done.
That needs to be able to continue, as opposed to AI being a consolidator. And what I worry about is the fact that the small businesses that most of us do business with today, the relationship that we have with them is personal or based on mere convenience. your AI agent isn’t going to necessarily care about those things. And so we need to make sure that small businesses, and especially those in the global South, have the tools to be able to survive as the world moves to more and more agentic commerce. We also need to recognize that unique cultures and unique identities, languages, shouldn’t be homogenized by AI. There is no one universal culture, and we can’t forget those things that make each region and each part of the world unique.
AI needs to respect and actually emphasize that. We don’t want to make the mistake of just merely Americanizing the world, but instead we want to honor the culture of all of those places around the world and honor those things that have made us unique. AI shouldn’t remove our humanity, it should accelerate it and enhance it. And finally, we need to make sure that the technology is available to all, especially the poorest of those in the global south. This can’t be something where you can only get the latest, unbiased, unfiltered, highest technology if you can afford to spend thousands of dollars per month on a subscription. There needs to be a business model that allows AI to be available to the broadest set of users and make sure that we aren’t leaving people behind with this incredibly powerful technology.
That’s the framework that I would aim for. One where AI is distributed, not controlled. One where AI is actually enabling creators and research. One where AI is enabling businesses, small and large, to compete on a fair playing field. One where AI is bringing about our humanity and our differences, not homogenizing us. And one where it is available to all, not only held by the rich. I think that’s something that most of the people in this room can agree to. And I think that as we think about policy, as we… As we think about technology, we should be thinking about making sure that we are moving in that direction, moving towards all five of those goals, not moving away from them.
Unfortunately, we are not yet there. And I think we are at a crossroads and we need to all, whether in business or government or civil society, be thinking about what are the actions that we can take in order to achieve those five milestones. So how am I the person here talking about this? What in the world gives me any right to be up here speaking? Cloudflare runs one of the world’s largest networks. We have presence in over 120 countries, more than 300 cities worldwide. We see an enormous percentage of the world’s global Internet traffic. Over 20 % of the Internet sits behind us. And so we are not an AI company. We don’t have a model ourselves. But today, over 80 % of the leading AI companies use us.
So a huge percentage of the Internet uses us. A huge percent of the AI companies use us. And we sit in between those things and are working towards our mission, which is to help build a better Internet. When I say help. is really important. We don’t believe that we can do it alone. We believe that we need the work of all of the people in this room in order to contribute to that. But we do see and can act as a broker between these two sides, the content creators on one, the AI companies on the other, trying to figure out what is that future of the internet going to be? What does it look like?
How can we make sure that it continues to achieve all of those goals? And there are some real challenges. The internet that we know today was really built based on a very simple formula. And that formula was create great content that drove traffic and then monetize that traffic through either selling things, subscriptions, or ads. And if you think about it, that’s how the internet was funded over that period of time. And Google was the great patron of funding that. In fact, the way that we can measure how this has changed is to actually look at how Google’s behavior has changed. Ten years ago, we have data on this based on Cloudflare. for every two pages that Google scraped on the internet, they sent you back one human visitor.
And with that human visitor, again, you could sell them something, you could show them an ad, you could get them to subscribe to whatever you were doing. That was the business model of the internet. And that’s what caused the internet to flourish. But that business model is fading away. If you look at Google themselves, they have gotten to the point that for every 30 pages they scrape today, they only send you one. It’s gotten 15 times harder to get traffic from a Google search. Microsoft is even worse, 70 to one. But that’s the good news. If we look at the pure AI companies, OpenAI, 3 ,700 pages taken from the internet for every one visitor they send back. And in Anthropic’s case, 500 ,000, a half a million pages scraped for every one visitor you send back.
The world is going to… …look more like Anthropic over time. And that is going to put pressure on what has been the historic business model of the internet and what I worry about. is that researchers, journalists, small businesses are going to get crushed by this change unless we recognize it and try and figure out what is a new way of dealing with this. How are we able to stay in front of these changes? What is the new business model of the internet going to look like? And so when we think about this, human eyeball traffic, the current currency of the internet, is going away. It’s going to be, and it’s never going to return in the same way.
We are all getting our answers more from AI than from original sources. And so we have to figure out some new way in order to compensate creators. And that might be very pessimistic, but I actually am optimistic about that. Because you see, it turns out that what we really want to compensate people for, for a better internet, is not repeating the mistakes of the internet’s past. The internet was never built with security in mind. We should be thinking about that with AI. And it was always wrong to equate traffic with value. There are a lot of times that are things that are salacious, that generate a lot of traffic, but don’t actually further human knowledge.
And so there’s an opportunity as we think about what the new business model of the internet is to try and figure out a reward system that actually rewards creators for furthering human knowledge. And what’s amazing is this is directly aligned with what the AI companies want. If you think about it, for the first time in human history, we have something close to a mathematical model of all of human knowledge. It’s not perfect, but that’s what the sum total of the AI systems that we have are today. They are taking up that way, and they’re a way of quantifying what we know and what we don’t know. And what’s interesting is I think of it as like a giant block of Swiss cheese.
And that block has a lot of cheese in it, but it also has a lot of holes. And those holes are the places where there are holes in human knowledge. And what the AI companies want, what all of us actually want, is for those holes to be filled. And if we could create a system where creators are actually rewarded by filling in those blanks in the Swiss cheese, those holes on the Swiss cheese, by rewarding people not for creating content which is rage baiting, content which makes people angry, content which is designed just to provoke, but instead content which is designed to further human knowledge, that is something that we have a market for today and that the AI companies are excited to pay for.
What we also have to think about is how we avoid the cycle of centralization and control. And we’ve seen this with technology over and over again. Telecoms exhibited it, social networks exhibited it, the hyperscalers are exhibiting it. And there is real risk that if we don’t make it so that more and more people can create an AI company, if we end up with a world of five AI companies, not 500 ,000, that is worse for everyone around the rest of the world. And so what we’re trying to do is think about how we can create and how we can make sure that anyone, anywhere in the world has the tools and the knowledge and the ability to compete in this incredibly exciting space.
We need to stop the consolidation of AI and, again, lead to 500 ,000 companies, not just five. So what we’re fighting for at Cloudflare, as an example, and what I would ask that anyone who is playing in this space fights for, is how do we make sure that we level the playing field and that we make sure that everyone around the world can participate in what is this incredible technology? We need to make sure that AI is coming to all the parts of the world, including the global south. And I am inspired by the stories of startups and students here in India that are inventing an AI future. We need to make sure we cultivate an environment where that AI future can grow and it doesn’t get stifled by a handful of companies that are out there.
So at Cloudflare, what specifically are we doing in order to make sure that this is the case? We’re trying to figure out how can we make sure that content is available all around the world and is accessible? And widely available to everyone. That’s by taking the top models and making them available across our global network so they can be run in the city where you are actually living. Um, that, that also means that we should make it easy to use and enroll in these, in these systems. So making it so that you don’t have to have a degree in computer science to start playing with AI models and making sure that that’s, that’s the case.
What we also are doing is actually funding the education of both startups and students to, uh, to do this. So we have our own startup accelerator and in India, it is the second largest by a country participants come from here. And it’s amazing to see what all of the startups in India are creating. And we’re proud of the fact that we are giving enormous credits to be able to use our services for free for startups that are trying to build that next generation and take on some of those giants. Okay. Okay. We’re trying to make sure that this is adaptable and multimodal around the world. So we have adopted the ability to roll out models across our platform that support all of the different things that you need, wherever you are in the world.
And those models should be regionalized so that they can be trained on local laws, local languages, and local cultures. I’m proud of the fact that we have done this with AI for Bharat, which we rolled out with 22 official languages across all of India and made it available for students in India to be able to experiment and try. And it’s incredible what we’re seeing people build with these models. We also launched an IIT build -a -thon to be able to take this with AI for Bharat and Cloudflare Workers AI. And it’s incredible what the students there were able to build and deliver. We also need to have secure by design. That’s the key to what we’re doing.
We need to not make the same mistakes that we had with the internet before. And we need to make sure that it’s actionable and affordable. It can’t be that you have to have trillions of dollars of budget. You have to stand up your own nuclear power plant in order to be the next AI company. And so we’re designing systems and we’re working not just to say how much money can we throw at the problem, but how can we make these systems more efficient so that we can pass on that cost and make it more affordable for everyone. These are the work that we’re doing at Cloudflare, and I would challenge anyone in the audience, if you’re working in AI, strive for these five values.
How can we make sure that everyone has a chance to participate in the AI economy? We want to make that available for the world. We can’t say that this is going to be a technology that is restricted to literally five companies in one postal code in San Francisco that have access to it. It needs to be available to the world. We’re here to help. I appreciate all of the effort and the great hosts from the AI Summit in India, and I’m looking forward to Geneva. Thank you.
“Matthew Prince delivered the opening keynote at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, thanking the audience and hosts.”
The knowledge base records Matthew Prince speaking at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, confirming his presence and role as keynote speaker [S43].
“Matthew Prince is the CEO of Cloudflare and was the featured keynote speaker at the event.”
Speaker information lists Matthew Prince as the CEO of Cloudflare and the keynote presenter [S6].
“The Gutenberg printing press was invented near Mainz, Germany.”
The source notes that the printing press was invented in Mainz, Germany in 1440 [S47].
“The printing press spread in a decentralized way, with no single nation able to gate‑keep or suppress it.”
Discussion of the printing press highlights its fragmented diffusion and the lack of any one government controlling it, enabling democratization of ideas [S48].
“Prince described the spread of the printing press as a “once‑in‑a‑lifetime” moment that improved society, drawing a parallel to AI.”
The knowledge base refers to the printing press as a “once-in-a-lifetime” moment that made the world better, providing contextual support for Prince’s analogy [S52].
The transcript contains only a brief introductory remark from Speaker 1 and a substantive keynote by Matthew Prince. Apart from a shared courteous opening ([1][2]), there are no substantive points on which the two speakers agree or diverge, because Speaker 1 does not present any arguments. Consequently, the discussion shows minimal overlap in viewpoints.
Very low – the only observable consensus is a polite greeting. This limits the ability to draw broader conclusions about shared policy positions or strategic priorities for AI.
The session consisted of an introductory remark by Speaker 1 ([1]) followed by a single, uninterrupted presentation by Matthew Prince ([2-155]). No other speakers offered contrasting positions, and Prince’s remarks do not contain explicit counter-arguments to his own statements. Consequently, the transcript shows no direct disagreement between participants; the discussion is effectively a monologue presenting a set of proposals.
Minimal – the lack of opposing viewpoints means there is no substantive conflict to negotiate. This suggests strong internal consensus on the five‑point framework, but also indicates that the feasibility and policy pathways will need to be debated in subsequent multi‑stakeholder forums.
Matthew Prince’s remarks collectively shaped the discussion from a historical analogy into a multi‑dimensional roadmap for an inclusive AI future. By repeatedly juxtaposing the printing press’s diffusion with today’s risk of AI concentration, he reframed the debate around decentralization, creator compensation, cultural diversity, and economic sustainability. Each pivotal comment introduced a new layer—ethical, geographic, economic, technical—that broadened the conversation and forced listeners to consider concrete policy and engineering responses rather than abstract optimism. The speech’s turning points—particularly the diagnosis of the collapsing traffic‑based business model and the Swiss‑cheese knowledge‑gap metaphor—shifted the tone from aspirational to problem‑solving, steering the audience toward actionable solutions such as regional model deployment and reward mechanisms for knowledge creation.
Disclaimer: This is not an official session record. DiploAI generates these resources from audiovisual recordings, and they are presented as-is, including potential errors. Due to logistical challenges, such as discrepancies in audio/video or transcripts, names may be misspelled. We strive for accuracy to the best of our ability.
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