x401 Protocol Created by Proof Now Offers Simple Cloudflare Integration, So Cloudflare Workers Can Verify the Human Behind the Agent

AI agents are taking on increasingly important activities, and for most sites that puts their operators between a rock and a hard place – because while AI agents are browsing, buying and booking, major players like Amazon, JP Morgan, Bank of America and Citi Bank are blocking, blocking, and blocking. 

Blocking agents is understandable, but not sustainable: block agents and you lose any real customers using them, but if you let agents in indiscriminately then you can’t tell a person’s authorized agent from an anonymous bot. 

Now, there’s a third option: x401, the open HTTP proof-requirement protocol for agentic commerce created by Proof. With x401, sites can verify the agent is acting on a real human's authority, authority that’s attached to a real digital credential, before letting the agent take action. 

Built on HTTP’s familiar 401 and the OpenID for Verifiable Presentations standard, x401 is live in production and now works with Cloudflare Workers. 

How x401 works with Cloudflare Workers

When an agent requests a protected endpoint without identity, your Worker replies with a 401 and a request for a credential. The agent passes the request to the person’s Proof wallet. The person approves sharing their Proof Digital ID, and the agent retries the protected endpoint with the presented credential. Your Worker verifies it with Proof, and runs your handler with the verified identity.

x401 is live for teams that run a site on Cloudflare Workers 

Developers and platform teams that run a site on Cloudflare Workers can now use x401   @proof.com/x401-workers, an open-source package that adds x401 to any Cloudflare Worker. The package will be most useful to developer and platform teams who:

• Run a site or API on Cloudflare Workers, including apps built with Hono.
• Are seeing AI agent traffic and want to serve it, not block it.
• Have actions that need a real person behind them, like checkout, account changes, regulated or age-restricted content, or high-value API calls.
• Want identity checks that work at the edge, before a request ever reaches the rest of their stack.

Deploy x401 where knowing whether an agent is acting on a human’s authorization actually matters, like high-consequence decisions with meaningful outcomes .

Become a Proof x401 Verifier in minutes

Putting your endpoints behind identity verification has never been this easy. Register your signing key with Proof and start verifying identities right away. A sandbox is available to test before you go live.

You’ll need a domain you control served over HTTPS, an email address on that domain and a Cloudflare D1 database or KV namespace. A sandbox environment is available for testing before you go live.

Go further with x401 

• x401 full docs: dev.proof.com/docs/x401-cloudflare
• Pay for x401 with x402: Proof accepts x402 payments for x401, so agents can pay for verification programmatically.
• x401 protocol spec: x401.proof.com
• X401-workers SDK: github.com/proof/x401-workers