The Open-Source Software Saving the Internet From AI Bot Scrapers.

There are people who spend their free time scrolling through TikTok, reading a book, or watching a series, and then there is Xe Iaso, a VTuber, streamer, and technical educator who, in her spare time, fights against artificial intelligence scraper bots. These kinds of “tools” are bots dedicated to scraping content from websites, whether it be text, images, or any other kind of information. This illegal collection of data is, understandably, a threat to most website managers, which is why protecting against bots is becoming more and more of a priority.

In January, to address this threat, Xe Iaso released Anubis, a “program designed to help protect the small Internet from the endless storm of requests coming from artificial intelligence companies.” Since the beginning of the year, the software has been downloaded nearly 200,000 times, even by some pretty big names, such as UNESCO.

Anubis works by verifying that any user accessing a site is a human using a real browser, and not a bot. The verification is invisible to the user, and technically a bot could be programmed to circumvent this limitation, but implementing this specification would require excessive additional computational costs.