Elon Musk said artificial intelligence (AI) agent traffic will vastly exceed human internet usage, calling Cloudflare’s forecast accurate.
Musk shared an article reporting remarks from Cloudflare Chief Financial Officer Thomas Seifert, who told investors that non-human traffic could reach 1,000 times human levels within 5 years.
Musk Weighs In on the AI Agent Takeover
Musk described the trend as certain rather than a close call.
Follow us on X to get the latest news as it happens
Seifert made the underlying projection during Cloudflare’s second-quarter earnings call on Thursday. According to him, humans will become “a rounding error on the internet.”
“To give you a sense of how this trend is playing out, and with the big caveat that I have called it wrong at every point along the way, if the current trends continue, we think in five years, non-human traffic will be as much as 1,000 times as much as human traffic,” he said.
Cloudflare had previously expected machine-generated traffic to overtake humans in 2027. Instead, the crossover arrived in May 2026.
The growth of AI agents is also expected to extend beyond web traffic and into online commerce. According to ARK’s projections, AI agents could account for nearly 25% of digital spending by 2030, up from about 2% in 2025. The firm estimates that the agents could facilitate roughly $8 trillion in online commerce by the end of the decade.
Independent Data Backs the Trend
The projection sits alongside several third-party reports that reached similar conclusions. HUMAN Security’s 2026 State of AI Traffic report found automated traffic growing eight times faster than human activity.
“Monthly volumes of AI-driven traffic grew 187% from January to December 2025. More than 95% of AI-driven traffic is concentrated within three verticals: retail & e-commerce, streaming & media, and travel & hospitality,” the report read.
Imperva’s 2026 Bad Bot Report calculated that 53% of web traffic in 2025 was automated. Fastly, meanwhile, counted bots at 49% of January 2026 requests but flagged 99% of them as unwanted.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel to watch leaders and journalists provide expert insights
Bitrue