“We don't have a token leaderboard. We don't encourage it. We encourage people to focus on the output. They're not graded on if they used it. They're graded on what they've shipped and what they've built.”
No Priors · AI Research & Frontier Labs · October 2026
Asked how Cloudflare manages AI token spending. The guardrails are light: an employee gets an email past $300 in a day, their manager hears about it at $500, and a VP at $1,000.
Transcript
It's definitely changed. And each model kind of makes you rethink it as the cost dynamics change. But, you know, in general, I think it's kind of silly that we're actually asking humans to decide which model to do each task. Like
it should be intelligently routed. Yeah, exactly.
…go back and you have one of the frontier models, do the reviews and the red teaming and things like that. Now, all that today is fairly manual. But I think as we start to learn and experiment, I think people become intelligent. And over time, there'll be more governance on that. Cloudflare has been in a place where largely we've let people use the models and tools that they see fit for the job. We don't have a token leaderboard. We don't encourage it. We encourage people to focus on the output. They're not graded on if they used it. They're graded on what they've shipped and what they've built. But then we do have some kind of, we found like just kind of giving people notices. If you happen to use $300 a day, they'll just get an email, right? Like says, hey, did you know? And because most of the time people didn't realize they were doing it. And they're like, oh, huh. And then I think if it gets to like 500, it goes to your manager. If it goes to 1,000, it goes to a VP in a day. But…
Where do you think you are in your overall evolution of take things just for the current level of capabilities of models, assume no new development, of rethinking the way different things at Cloudflare are done from go-to-market to engineering to be
still so early? Conflict is something two years ago, we had about 200 interns. And what we saw was those interns, I think, were really the first fully kind of AI native, where you took AI away from them. I don't think they would be. To work. And is that good? Actually, I think it is. I think they…
5,000 person company.
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