The new wrangler temporary flag gives background agents a 60 minute live window to ship serverless code, APIs, and other deployments, with an optional human claim path before expiry.
A background AI agent trying to push code to a server has, until this week, been stuck behind a wall built for humans: browser-based OAuth logins, dashboard click-throughs, copy-paste API tokens, and MFA prompts that require a person in the loop. Cloudflare's answer, announced in a blog post on 2026-06-19 by Sid Chatterjee, Celso Martinho, and Brendan Irvine-Broque, is a deploy primitive that treats that wall as a solvable design problem rather than a feature.
The mechanism is a single new flag. Running wrangler deploy --temporary from Wrangler, Cloudflare's command-line tool, ships a Worker, an API, or another deployment to Cloudflare's developer platform without first creating a Cloudflare account. The deployment stays live for 60 minutes. During that window, a human can claim the temporary account and convert it to a permanent one. If no one claims it, the deployment expires on its own.
That claim-or-expire shape is the part worth interrogating. Cloudflare is not just removing a step from the sign-up flow. It is carving out a deploy primitive that explicitly accounts for the agent-human handoff: the agent gets autonomy to ship and verify on a tight loop, and a human can later take ownership, with a hard upper bound if they do not. The post frames the goal as letting agents "code and ship" without a human in the loop, naming browser OAuth, dashboard click-through, API token copy-paste, and MFA prompts as the friction the new flow is designed to dissolve.
The friction exists for reasons. Sign-up gates are where abuse prevention, billing accountability, and traceability live. Cloudflare's resolution is one specific answer to that tension, not a settled one: a 60-minute live window plus an optional claim path. A rogue or buggy agent that runs unclaimed leaves Cloudflare holding a deploy that someone has to clean up. The post does not address who carries the cleanup cost, what the abuse surface looks like at scale, or how this interacts with billing for paid Workers tiers. Those are open questions, not deal-breakers, but they are the questions a deploy primitive of this shape will draw within hours of independent developer testing.
What changes for the developer running background agents is the workflow shape. Trial-and-error loops, where an agent writes code, deploys it, checks a response, and iterates, have been throttled by the need for a human to babysit credentials. A 60-minute throwaway target lets the agent run that loop end-to-end. The claim path means a successful run can graduate to a permanent deployment without re-deploying. Whether this normalizes agents as first-class deploy actors on Cloudflare's platform, or seeds a broader agent-identity layer, is the second-order question Cloudflare has not answered and may not need to until adoption data arrives, according to the post.
Cloudflare's framing is careful to position this as a deploy-time feature, not a general identity layer. That boundary matters. A general agent-identity product would imply who is liable for an agent's actions across the platform. A deploy primitive leaves those questions for later and for others. The 60-minute window and the optional claim path are the narrow version, and the version Cloudflare shipped.