Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET) announced a collaboration with Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Shopify to develop a privacy-preserving protocol called Private Access Control Tokens, or PACT, intended to help websites distinguish legitimate human and bot traffic from malicious automated traffic.

The initiative aims to reduce reliance on CAPTCHAs, forced logins, and invasive tracking by allowing sites to issue anonymous tokens that a user's browser can present to other sites as proof of human involvement. The protocol is designed so that sites cannot use it to track users or their browsing history.

Cloudflare said the group intends to submit PACT for standardization. The company stated the protocol is designed to work across human visitors and AI-powered agents acting on behalf of users.

Dane Knecht, CTO of Cloudflare, said in a statement: "As AI-powered traffic becomes widespread, existing tools to support its use are too generic and coarse. Now this collaboration lets us eliminate the friction caused by security protocols for every visitor—whether they are human or agent—without sacrificing privacy."

Shopify's Distinguished Engineer Ilya Grigorik said the company is participating to help merchants distinguish legitimate shoppers and authorized agents from abusive traffic while preserving buyer privacy. Bobby Holley, CTO for Firefox at Mozilla, described the project as a response to an increase in automated traffic pushing sites toward invasive defenses such as paywalls and identity checks.

Erik Anderson, Director of Engineering for the Web Platform at Microsoft Edge, said Microsoft is committed to helping develop the new standards and ensuring their deployment across the open web.

According to the press release, PACT is intended to leverage trusted information from contexts that have existing relationships with users while keeping that information private, providing website operators with assurances about their visitors without additional friction.