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Open source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/devs-say-ai-crawlers-dominate-traffic-forcing-blocks-on-entire-countries/Software developer Xe Iaso reached a breaking point earlier this year when aggressive AI crawler traffic from Amazon overwhelmed their Git repository service, repeatedly causing instability and downtime. Despite configuring standard defensive measures—adjusting robots.txt, blocking known crawler user-agents, and filtering suspicious traffic—Iaso found that AI crawlers continued evading all attempts to stop them, spoofing user-agents and cycling through residential IP addresses as proxies.
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Iaso's story highlights a broader crisis rapidly spreading across the open source community, as what appear to be aggressive AI crawlers increasingly overload community-maintained infrastructure, causing what amounts to persistent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on vital public resources. According to a comprehensive recent report from LibreNews, some open source projects now see as much as 97 percent of their traffic originating from AI companies' bots, dramatically increasing bandwidth costs, service instability, and burdening already stretched-thin maintainers.
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The situation has created a tough challenge for open source projects, which rely on public collaboration and typically operate with limited resources compared to commercial entities. Many maintainers have reported that AI crawlers deliberately circumvent standard blocking measures, ignoring robots.txt directives, spoofing user agents, and rotating IP addresses to avoid detection.
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While many AI companies engage in web crawling, the sources suggest varying levels of responsibility and impact. Dennis Schubert's analysis of Diaspora's traffic logs showed that approximately one-fourth of its web traffic came from bots with an OpenAI user agent, while Amazon accounted for 15 percent and Anthropic for 4.3 percent.
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Iaso's story highlights a broader crisis rapidly spreading across the open source community, as what appear to be aggressive AI crawlers increasingly overload community-maintained infrastructure, causing what amounts to persistent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on vital public resources. According to a comprehensive recent report from LibreNews, some open source projects now see as much as 97 percent of their traffic originating from AI companies' bots, dramatically increasing bandwidth costs, service instability, and burdening already stretched-thin maintainers.
-snip-
The situation has created a tough challenge for open source projects, which rely on public collaboration and typically operate with limited resources compared to commercial entities. Many maintainers have reported that AI crawlers deliberately circumvent standard blocking measures, ignoring robots.txt directives, spoofing user agents, and rotating IP addresses to avoid detection.
-snip-
While many AI companies engage in web crawling, the sources suggest varying levels of responsibility and impact. Dennis Schubert's analysis of Diaspora's traffic logs showed that approximately one-fourth of its web traffic came from bots with an OpenAI user agent, while Amazon accounted for 15 percent and Anthropic for 4.3 percent.
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