New York, January 29, 2026, 14:13 EST — Regular session underway.
- Cloudflare shares dipped in afternoon trading, adding to a turbulent week for NET
- According to a recent SEC filing, director Carl Ledbetter sold shares using a 10b5-1 plan
- Investors are eyeing if the buzz around AI agents will actually drive paid usage in upcoming earnings reports
Shares of Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) dropped 2.5% to $180.25 in Thursday afternoon trading, after fluctuating between $175.20 and $188.24 earlier in the day.
The stock’s plunge deepens a steep turnaround from earlier this week. It closed Wednesday down 10.2%, following a gain of 8.8% the previous day. 1
Risk appetite has cooled across U.S. tech stocks. “We are starting to look under the hood,” Max Wasserman, co-founder and senior portfolio manager at Miramar Capital, said as investors demanded clearer returns from hefty AI investments. 2
Cloudflare quickly emerged as a standout in the AI agent space after social media buzz around “Clawdbot,” an AI agent built on Anthropic’s Claude, took off. AI agents differ by acting autonomously rather than just responding to prompts. Developers using Clawdbot rely on Cloudflare’s fast, low-latency network to run it locally. Wolfe Research analyst Joshua Tilton noted, “we believe NET is positioned to capture that activity.” CEO Matthew Prince told analysts, “The agents of the future will inherently have to pass through our network and abide by its rules.” 3
Cloudflare’s developer changelog revealed a new image model on its Workers AI service Wednesday: Black Forest Labs’ FLUX.2 [klein] 9B. The update noted the model is optimized for speed, featuring a fixed four-step inference process—essentially the number of compute steps it takes to produce an output. 4
Insiders grabbed attention as a filing revealed director Carl Ledbetter offloaded 15,000 shares on Jan. 27 at weighted-average prices just over $210. These sales went through a trust and were marked under a Rule 10b5-1 plan—a prearranged program allowing scheduled sales. 5
Selling pressure mirrored a wider slump across the sector. Fastly slipped roughly 4.5%, Akamai Technologies dropped close to 3%, and Datadog plunged over 8% as investors pared back on higher-beta software stocks.
But the Clawdbot trade still needs to show up in billed usage. If the spike in developer interest remains mostly experimental, or customers pull back spending amid tighter budgets, Cloudflare’s figures might barely budge — leaving the stock vulnerable.
Cloudflare’s next major event is set for Feb. 10, with quarterly results coming out after the U.S. market closes. The company will also hold a conference call at 5 p.m. ET. 6
