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Dr. James Smith

Dr. James Smith

Co-Founder & CEO, Human Native

Appears in 1 story

Notable Quotes

"We started Human Native with the goal of getting Generative AI out of its Napster era. We believe that creators should have control, compensation and credit when their work is used to power AI products." — Cloudflare acquisition announcement, January 2026

"I'm the CEO of a two-month-old company and have been able to get meetings with CEOs of 160-year-old publishing companies." — TechCrunch, June 2024

Stories

The race to build AI's payment layer

Money Moves

Joining Cloudflare

For two years, AI companies have trained their models on web content while paying for almost none of it. That era may be ending. Cloudflare's acquisition of Human Native, announced January 15, 2026, adds a London-based data marketplace to an infrastructure stack that already includes bot-blocking tools, pay-per-crawl billing, and the x402 machine payment protocol built with Coinbase. Days after the acquisition, Cloudflare signaled its next move: a dollar-backed stablecoin called NET to power AI micropayments, turning the x402 protocol from concept into usable financial infrastructure.

Updated Jan 16