It would be difficult for them to provide intelligence to the US without being in the middle of everything.

I think Cloudflare is (for companies already using it) approaching the status of trusted main cloud supplier (which usually would be AWS, GCP, Azure) via which the majority of cloud costs are billed (so you don't have to go through a fresh procurement process).

I've been using the web search in OpenRouter, which is similar in that it's a wrapper around other search engine providers. It's really convenient to be able to experiment with new models and new search engines without having to go through corporate hoops to subscribe to a new service.

Ease of integration and billing. Failover. Higher trust.

How else you are going to make them give you search second party API's, they just bridge it for you reliably

Cloudflare are setting themselves up as the arbiter who will decide which requests are a) human, b) authorized AI bots, c) illicit/banned bots.

Given the number of people on HN who report massive problems from scrapers and other bots, it sounds like if Cloudflare doesn't do this, someone else will need to. I might have thought bandwidth was cheap enough now for it not to matter, but I guess the bots are costing some sites a lot of money.

You tell us, you're the president of bonsai.io.

Why would I use bonsai? Why not use ElasticSearch directly?

National security, bro.