CNBC Changemakers and Power Players · Oct 20, 2026 · 40m · 34m saved
With Michelle Zatlyn, Co-founder & President of Cloudflare
Cloudflare now sees roughly 234 billion cyberthreats a day. Most security leaders describe AI mainly as a new kind of attacker. Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder and president of Cloudflare, told CNBC's Julia Boorstin on Changemakers and Power Players that AI is reshaping both sides of that fight at once, making defense far stronger even as it arms the attackers too.
"AI is a real double-edged sword for cybersecurity because, on one hand, it makes cybersecurity much more powerful, but AI is also creating extraordinary threats, unlike anything we've ever seen before."
Michelle co-founded Cloudflare with Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway and has helped run it through a 20% workforce cut this year and a scale-up that now screens hundreds of billions of threats a day.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 40 minutes of audio, 5 minutes of reading.
Here are the 5 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
Cloudflare now blocks roughly 234 billion cyberthreats a day
Michelle compares AI's scale to the invention of electricity and the internet, saying the industry will only fully understand it "in 30 years"
Cloudflare rejected "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" marketing from its earliest days, choosing to help solve problems rather than scare customers
Cloudflare cut about 20% of its workforce in May 2026, citing AI directly — some teams went from four people to one
Michelle's survival strategy for workers is to become "builders and sellers", tied to the rise of forward deployed engineers at AWS, Anthropic and OpenAI
Cloudflare's 2026 intern class is its largest ever, at roughly 1,100 people, about 25% of total headcount
1. AI as a Double-Edged Sword
Julia Boorstin opened the conversation on AI's dual role in security: a technology that makes defense far more capable while also arming attackers with tools they never had before.
Cloudflare now blocks roughly 234 billion cyberthreats a day
"[The 234 billion daily attacks] just gives you a sense for the craziness of the internet." — Michelle Zatlyn
Michelle said the near-term picture will get "very noisy" before it gets better, as AI capability spreads to attackers as fast as it spreads to defenders. Her longer-run bet is that AI will eventually handle up to 95% of cybersecurity work within five years, because code will increasingly be "secure by design" rather than patched after the fact.
AI's scale compares to the invention of electricity, in her view
"I'm absolutely in the camp of AI is changing everything. This is just as big as the invention of electricity, the invention of the internet... we're going to look back in 30 years, and it's just going to be everywhere, embedded into everything." — Michelle Zatlyn
