The White House rolled out its AI Action Plan on July 23, 2025. The 28-page document sets priorities across three pillars: accelerating AI innovation, building American AI infrastructure, and leading international AI diplomacy and security.
Cloudflare submitted input on the plan, pushing for U.S. leadership in AI and support for open-source models. The company supports policies that avoid protectionist tech restrictions and promote global, distributed AI networks.
The plan backs open-source and open-weight AI models to boost innovation and accessibility. Cloudflare highlights this aligns with their Workers AI model catalog, which offers 50+ open-source AI models and GPU-powered edge inference. 
Cybersecurity features heavily in the plan. It endorses AI for defending critical infrastructure and demands secure-by-design AI tech. Cloudflare’s network blocks 247 billion attacks daily using AI. Their new AI Labyrinth tool uses AI to trap malicious crawlers in endless, AI-generated web mazes.
Cloudflare is ready to help the government adopt AI faster. The company is FedRAMP Moderate authorized, targeting FedRAMP High, offering scalable AI infrastructure to federal agencies.
The plan also tackles the tricky issue of AI export controls. It balances aggressive AI exports to allies with tighter restrictions on adversaries. Cloudflare warns overly broad controls could stifle innovation and hurt global AI access.
The White House stresses collaboration with industry, inviting companies like Cloudflare into the regulatory mix. The plan calls for new export programs and better enforcement, made “in collaboration with industry.”
Cloudflare praised the plan’s push to accelerate AI growth, boost infrastructure, and lead on AI diplomacy. They emphasized the need for open, secure, and interoperable AI networks to maintain U.S. tech leadership.
Cloudflare stated:
The Plan takes the position that the U.S. is in a global race to achieve AI dominance, and that it is a national priority for U.S. technology companies to be the gold standard for AI globally. Through the Plan, President Trump commits his Administration to support American workers, technology, and energy to achieve that objective.
We share the view that governments have a helpful role to play in shaping rules and regulations that will enable private-sector innovation to flourish. For Cloudflare’s network to continue to operate globally, we need the U.S. government to shape and influence the right regulatory conditions. They should balance national and economic security concerns, promote consensus industry-led international standards, and support interoperable regulatory regimes.
Far too often in recent years, we’ve observed policy developments that have unnecessarily increased restrictions on U.S. technology providers and have made it challenging to operate. Protectionist mandates, including data sovereignty requirements, customer data retention policies, various supervisory and government access requirements, do little to improve security or innovation and have unintended consequences. Protectionism increases costs for businesses, limits access to world-class technologies, and increases cybersecurity risk.
Implementing policies that guarantee access to global, distributed edge-compute networks and the freedom to choose the best technology for users’ needs will help ensure the right conditions to enable AI to flourish.
Cloudflare added on open-source AI:
Cloudflare shares the view that open-source AI models play a crucial role in driving innovation. As recognized in the Plan, these models offer companies flexibility, freeing them from dependence on closed providers and enabling the use of AI with sensitive data where exporting to closed models might not be possible. That’s why Cloudflare includes access to more than fifty open-source models as part of our Workers AI model catalog.
On cybersecurity:
Cloudflare’s network uses predictive AI and machine learning to block 247 billion cyberattacks daily. Under the theory of Defensive AI, Cloudflare uses information to constantly improve the effectiveness of our security solutions. With AI Labyrinth, we’ve even created a new tool that uses AI to trap AI. It is a new, next generation honeypot and cybersecurity defensive tool that leverages AI to confuse crawlers and bots that ignore "no crawl" directives. Instead of blocking these bots, AI Labyrinth directs bots into an endless maze of convincing, AI-generated pages.
On government AI adoption:
Cloudflare can be a key partner in this journey. Our platform provides the secure, reliable, and scalable infrastructure necessary for federal agencies to deploy AI applications with full-stack AI building blocks. Cloudflare is FedRAMP Moderate authorized, and we are committed to FedRAMP High. By leveraging Cloudflare’s global network, federal agencies can ensure their AI initiatives are resilient and accessible, driving greater public benefit.
On export controls:
Although we appreciate the need for restricting access to sensitive compute resources, overly broad or imprecise controls could inadvertently stifle innovation and impede the open exchange of ideas crucial for AI development. The implementation of export controls must be meticulously balanced to target adversaries effectively without unwittingly hindering the very innovation and secure global digital ecosystem it seeks to protect.
Cloudflare is watching the AI policy landscape closely as the U.S. pushes forward to lead global AI development, innovation, security, and diplomacy.
