Cloudflare gives agents a 60-minute deployment account

Cloudflare introduced Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for AI agents, centered on a new Wrangler path: wrangler deploy --temporary. An agent can deploy a Worker without first signing up for a Cloudflare account. The temporary deployment stays live for 60 minutes, during which a human can claim the account and make it permanent. If nobody claims it, it expires.

The feature targets a specific friction point in agent workflows. Human developers can click through OAuth, dashboards, API token pages, and multi-factor prompts. Background agents cannot. When an agent needs to deploy, curl its own output, inspect the result, and iterate, a browser-based signup flow becomes a hard stop rather than a small inconvenience.

Cloudflare says Wrangler now prompts agents about the temporary flag when they hit the authentication barrier. After the agent retries with --temporary, Cloudflare provisions a temporary account and gives Wrangler an API token for the deployment. That design makes the deploy-and-verify loop easier, but it also puts abuse prevention, rate limits, and cost controls in the spotlight.

The HN thread quickly moved beyond agents. Commenters pointed out that 60-minute scratch deployments could be valuable for PR previews, code review, and quick experiments even without an autonomous agent in the loop. Others asked for stronger billing caps and clearer guardrails. The broader signal is that developer platforms are adapting around agents by removing account setup from the first deployment path.