Cloudflare (NET) Falls Following Anthropic Launch and Analyst Buy Call

Cloudflare's stock fell after the launch of Anthropic, a rival artificial intelligence company, which caused Fastly and Akamai to also decline. Additionally, analysts are recommending Cloudflare stock as a tactical buy.

NET fell 11-13% over two sessions after Anthropic's April 8 launch of Claude Managed Agents, a hosted service that places the AI company in direct competition with Cloudflare's Workers AI infrastructure layer. The selloff extended to peers Fastly (down 18%) and AKAM (down 13%), reflecting broader investor concern that AI agent infrastructure could commoditize the enterprise edge-computing moats these CDN providers spent years building.

Cloudflare had positioned its global edge network — spanning 330+ cities — as the preferred infrastructure for deploying AI workloads at low latency. Anthropic's Claude Managed Agents targets exactly that market, offering composable APIs, secure sandboxing, and long-running session management in a fully managed package. Investors are now weighing whether enterprise customers will route AI agent workloads through Anthropic's platform rather than building on Cloudflare's edge primitives.

Despite the selloff, analyst consensus remains constructive: 64% of covering analysts hold Buy or Strong Buy ratings with an average price target of $234.08 per share. Cloudflare reported 34% year-over-year revenue growth in Q4 2025, with New ARR up 74% YoY — metrics that give bulls reason to view the dip as a sentiment-driven overreaction rather than a structural break in the business.