Cloudflare & Anthropic team up to power secure AI app links
Cloudflare has announced a collaboration with Anthropic to enable secure, real-time integrations between Anthropic's AI assistant Claude and major software-as-a-service companies, including Atlassian, Stripe, PayPal, Asana, and Intercom.
The partnership allows users to interact with business applications through natural conversation with Claude, bypassing the need to switch between multiple software tabs or interfaces. These connections are being facilitated by Cloudflare's new Managed Connection Proxy (MCP) toolkit, with Cloudflare stating it is currently the only platform simplifying the building of such integrations.
Atlassian is one of the first companies to utilise this new capability. Users of Atlassian's Jira and Confluence products can now interact with these tools via Claude, engaging in conversational AI rather than navigating traditional software interfaces. Taroon Mandhana, Head of Product Engineering at Atlassian, said, "AI is not one-size-fits-all and we believe that it needs to be embedded within a team's jobs to be done. That's why we're so excited to invest in MCP and meet teams in more places where they already work. Hosting on Cloudflare infrastructure means we can bring this powerful integration to our customers faster and empower them to do more than ever with Jira and Confluence, all while keeping their enterprise data secure. Cloudflare provided everything from OAuth to out-of-the-box remote MCP support so we could quickly build, secure, and scale a fully operational setup."
Cloudflare reports that global technology firms such as Asana, Block, PayPal, Sentry, Stripe, and more, are working with the company to develop AI experiences through Anthropic's Claude assistant. These companies are making it possible for Claude and similar AI assistants to securely interact with their software ecosystems on behalf of end users, leveraging connections built on Cloudflare Workers.
The goal is to facilitate truly autonomous, agentic AI experiences where the assistant can not only provide recommendations but also act on the user's behalf within business applications. This is made possible by deploying MCP servers that connect AI platforms directly to business tools, enabling tasks such as sending emails, responding to marketing queries, or generating invoices without switching out of the AI interface. Delivering secure and low-latency access to third-party tools and data presents substantial technical challenges, particularly on a global scale.
Matthew Prince, Cloudflare's Co-Founder and Chief Executive, stated, "Cloudflare is powering how AI connects to the world. Whether it's through a browser, an app, or an AI assistant like Claude, we're the backbone making those experiences fast, secure, and reliable. As agentic AI becomes the new interface, Cloudflare is the core infrastructure companies will rely on to build and scale their AI strategies."
Mahesh Murag, Product Manager at Anthropic, commented, "AI apps are most valuable when they can connect to your data and tools, but building these connections reliably at scale is complex. Cloudflare is helping to simplify and secure how anyone can connect their apps to Claude via MCP, accelerate adoption of MCP, and kickstart an ecosystem of remote servers."
The open-source MCP standard, developed by Anthropic, outlines how secure connections between AI agents and external software should be established. Cloudflare's toolkit provides developer teams with the means to build remote MCP servers efficiently, focusing on critical aspects such as authentication, permissions control, and data access visibility. Cloudflare asserts that deploying these servers can be achieved in days instead of weeks, supported by its global network to ensure reliably fast AI experiences.
Several companies have detailed their approaches to leveraging the MCP toolkit. Prashant Pandey, Chief Technology Officer at Asana, said, "At Asana, we've always focused on helping teams coordinate work effortlessly. MCP connects our Work Graph directly to AI tools like Claude, enabling AI to become a true teammate in work management. Our integration transforms natural language into structured work – creating projects from meeting notes or pulling updates into AI. Building on Cloudflare's infrastructure allowed us to deploy quickly, handling authentication and scaling while we focused on creating the best experience for our users."
Jordan Neill, SVP Engineering at Intercom, commented, "The momentum behind MCP is exciting. It's making it easier and easier to connect assistants like Claude and agents like Fin to your systems and get real work done. Cloudflare's toolkit is accelerating that movement even faster. Launching the Intercom MCP server was effortless. We'll be encouraging our customers to leverage Cloudflare to build and deploy their own MCP servers to securely and reliably connect their internal systems to Fin and other clients."
Tom Moor, Head of US Engineering at Linear, explained, "We're building on Cloudflare to take advantage of their frameworks in this fast-moving space and flexible, fast, compute at the edge. With MCP, we're bringing Linear's issue tracking and product development workflows directly into their AI tools of choice, eliminating context switching for teams. Our goal is simple: let developers and product teams access their work where they already are—whether refining specs in Claude, debugging in Cursor, or creating issues from conversations. This seamless integration helps our customers stay in flow and focused on building great products."
On the payments and commerce side, Prakhar Mehrotra, Senior Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at PayPal, said, "MCPs represent a new paradigm for software development. With PayPal's remote MCP server on Cloudflare, now developers can delegate to an agent with natural language to seamlessly integrate with PayPal's portfolio of commerce capabilities. Whether it's managing inventory, processing payments, tracking shipping, handling refunds, AI agents via MCP can tap into these capabilities to autonomously execute and optimize commerce workflows. This is a revolutionary development for commerce, and the best part is, developers can begin integrating with our MCP server on Cloudflare today."
David Cramer, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder at Sentry, noted, "Sentry's commitment has always been to the developer, and making it easier to keep production software running stable, and that's going to be even more true in the AI era. Developers are utilizing tools like MCP to integrate their stack with AI models and data sources. We chose to build our MCP on Cloudflare because we share a vision of making it easier for developers to ship software, and are both invested in ensuring teams can build and safely run the next generation of AI agents. Debugging the complex interactions arising from these integrations is increasingly vital, and Sentry provides the essential visibility needed to rapidly diagnose and resolve issues. MCP integrates this crucial Sentry context directly into the developer workflow, empowering teams to consistently build and deploy reliable applications."
Jeff Weinstein, Product Lead at Stripe, described, "MCP is emerging as a new AI interface. In the near-future, MCP may become the default way, or in some cases the only way, people, businesses, and code discover and interact with services. With Stripe's agent toolkit, developers can now monetize their MCPs with just a few lines of code."
Utkarsh Sengar, Vice President of Engineering at Webflow, added, "Since launching the Webflow MCP server, we've unlocked a new level of innovation as developers use AI agents and our APIs to simplify tasks that once took significant time and effort. Now, actions like managing a CMS, generating blogs at scale, improving SEO, and even getting help using Webflow can be achieved by simply prompting an AI agent. With Cloudflare's support for remote MCP connections, we're ensuring a seamless, secure experience while making authentication fast and easy. This partnership helps us bring development superpowers to everyone, providing the tools to build faster and smarter web experiences."
Cloudflare has also announced the launch of its own MCP servers, designed to allow users to more easily build applications, improve website performance, and enhance network security by conversing directly with Claude. This means developers can access support for tasks such as analysing logs and tracking errors through natural language, without consulting traditional documentation or navigating observability tools.
