FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

Three days ago, Drew DeVault - founder and CEO of SourceHut - published a blogpost called, "Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face", where he complained that LLM companies were crawling data without respecting robosts.txt and causing severe outages to SourceHut. I went, "Interesting!", and moved on. Then, yesterday morning, KDE GitLab infrastructure was overwhelmed by another AI crawler, with IPs from an Alibaba range; this caused GitLab to be temporarily inaccessible by KDE developers. I then discovered that, one week ago, an Anime girl started appearing on the GNOME GitLab instance, as the page was loaded. It turns out that it's the default loading page for Anubis, a proof-of-work challenger that blocks AI scrapers that are causing outages. By now, it should be pretty clear that this is no coincidence. AI scrapers are getting more and more aggressive, and - since FOSS software relies on public collaboration, whereas private companies don't have that requiremen ... Read full article.