Cloudflare Shares Surge 12% on AI Chatbot News

Written by Emily J. Thompson, Senior Investment Analyst

NET-2.43%

Source: seekingalpha

Updated: 2d ago

0mins

Source: seekingalpha

Stock Surge: Cloudflare shares jumped 12% during Tuesday trading, primarily driven by heightened awareness of its role in AI infrastructure due to a viral AI chatbot, indicating a significant market recognition shift.
Name Change: The AI assistant originally named Clawdbot was renamed Moltbot on Tuesday after its creator, Peter Steinberger, complied with Anthropic's request to avoid trademark issues, highlighting the importance of brand protection.
Technical Support: As an open-source AI assistant, Moltbot relies on Cloudflare's global edge network for secure and low-latency infrastructure, ensuring efficient operation across various applications and enhancing Cloudflare's market position in the AI sector.
Diverse Functionality: Moltbot can perform tasks across multiple platforms, such as managing users' inboxes and calendars, drafting messages and code, showcasing its potential to enhance user productivity and further drive Cloudflare's technology application scenarios.

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NET

$180.39+Infinity%1D

Analyst Views on NET

Wall Street analysts forecast NET stock price to rise over the next 12 months. According to Wall Street analysts, the average 1-year price target for NET is 253.24 USD with a low forecast of 131.00 USD and a high forecast of 318.00 USD. However, analyst price targets are subjective and often lag stock prices, so investors should focus on the objective reasons behind analyst rating changes, which better reflect the company's fundamentals.

25 Analyst Rating

15 Buy

10 Hold

0 Sell

Moderate Buy

Current: 184.880

Low

131.00

Averages

253.24

High

318.00

Current: 184.880

Low

131.00

Averages

253.24

High

318.00

TD Cowen

Buy

maintain

$265

2026-01-27

New

Reason

TD Cowen

Price Target

$265

AI Analysis

2026-01-27

New

maintain

Buy

Reason

TD Cowen attributes the premarket rally in shares of Cloudflare to increasing awareness of the company's role in AI infrastructure due to social media discussions related to an open source AI assistant built on Anthropic's Claude model, Clawdbot. Following a weekend of online discussion around Clawdbot, investors appear to have associated the momentum behind the tool with Cloudflare's infrastructure solutions commonly used to deploy and secure agents, the analyst tells investors in a research note. TD says the Cloudflare Tunnel allows developers to connect locally run tools such as AI agents on the internet without exposing their servers. The firm reiterates a Buy rating on the shares with a $265 price target. The stock in premarket trading is up 13%, or $23.86, to $213.21.

RBC Capital

Matthew Hedberg

Outperform

maintain

$265

2026-01-27

New

Reason

RBC Capital

Matthew Hedberg

Price Target

$265

2026-01-27

New

maintain

Outperform

Reason

RBC Capital analyst Matthew Hedberg attributes the recent rally in shares of Cloudflare to investors making a "derivative call" around an increase in AI workloads, including Anthropic's Claude Code and Cowork as well as a new open-source AI assistant, Clawdbot. While Anthropic's Claude Code and Cowork as well as Clawdbot are "not likely needle movers" for Cloudflare in the short-term, the continued growth of AI agents benefits Cloudflare and its Workers platform, the analyst tells investors in a research note. RBC believes Cloudflare is a "Tier 1 AI winner through its inferencing opportunity, Workers platform, and more recently its pay-per-crawl opportunity." It keeps an Outperform rating on the shares with a $265 price target. The stock in early trading is up 13% to $214.33.

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About NET

Cloudflare, Inc. is a connectivity cloud company. Its full suite of products consists of its website and application services to deliver security, performance, and reliability for an organization's websites, applications, and application programming interfaces (APIs); its secure access service edge (SASE) platform, which contains its suite of Zero Trust and network services solutions to help ensure traffic in and out of an organization’s internal network and devices is verified and authorized as well as to securely connect data centers, cloud services, and branch offices to an organization with its Connectivity Cloud; its developer-based solutions to build and deploy serverless applications with scale, performance, security and reliability, and its consumer offerings. Its website and application security product offerings include Web Application Firewall, Bot Management, Distributed Denial of Service Protection, API Security, SSL/TLS Encryption, Script Management, and Security Center.

About the author

Emily J. Thompson

Emily J. Thompson, a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) with 12 years in investment research, graduated with honors from the Wharton School. Specializing in industrial and technology stocks, she provides in-depth analysis for Intellectia’s earnings and market brief reports.