OPEN SOURCE DEVS SAY AI CRAWLERS DOMINATE TRAFFIC, FORCING BLOCKS ON ENTIRE COUNTRIES

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

Aggressive AI web crawlers are increasingly overloading community-maintained infrastructure, essentially causing persistent distributed denial-of-service attacks on vital public resources. Some open source projects now see as much as 97% of their traffic coming from AI companies' bots. This is dramatically increasing bandwidth costs and service instability and burdening maintainers. New defensive tools have emerged to protect websites from unwanted AI crawlers as prominent industry players have shown little incentive to adopt more cooperative practices.