At least their bots accurately identify themselves in the User-Agent field even when they're ignoring robots.txt, so serverside blocking is on the table for now at least.

Bytedances crawler (Bytespider) is another one which disregards robots.txt but still identifies itself, and you probably should block it because it's very aggressive.

It's going to get annoying fast when they inevitably go full blackhat and start masquerading as normal browser traffic.

For those saying "just use a CDN", it's not nearly that simple. Even behind a CDN, the crawlers on our site are hitting large files that aren't frequently accessed. This leads to large cache miss rates:

https://fosstodon.org/@readthedocs/112877477202118215

> Sites use robots.txt to tell well-behaved web crawlers what data is up for grabs and what data is off limits. Anthropic ignores it and takes your data anyway. That’s even if you’ve updated your robots.txt with the latest configuration details for Anthropic. [404 Media]

doesn't seem supported by the citation, https://www.404media.co/websites-are-blocking-the-wrong-ai-s...

It didn't take long for the "responsible" Anthropic to show its true colors.

[dupe]

Some more discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41060559

Cloudflare has a switch to block all the unknown bots other than the well behaved one. Would this be a simple solution to most of the sites? I wonder if the main concern here is that the sites don't want to waste bandwidth/compute for AI bots or they don't want their content to be used for training.

Just like Cloudflare many providers now just allow blocking: https://www.haproxy.com/blog/how-to-reliably-block-ai-crawle...

(disclaimer: I wrote this blog post)

I've noticed Anthropic bots in my logs for more than a year now and I welcome them. I'd love for their LLM to be better at what I'm interested in. I run my website off my home connection on a desktop computer and I've never had a problem. I'm not saying my dozens of run-ins with the anthropic bots (there have been 3 variations I've seen so far) are totally representative, but they've been respecting my robots.txt.

They even respect extended robots.txt features like,

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /library/*.pdf$

I make my websites for other people to see. They are not secrets I hoard who's value goes away when copied. The more copies and derivations the better.

I guess ideas like creative commons and sharing go away when the smell of money enters the water. Better lock all your text behind paywalls so the evil corporations won't get it. Just be aware, for every incorporated entity you block you're blocking just as many humans with false positives, if not more. This anti-"scraping" hysteria is mostly profit motivated.

I don't know if I should Block Claude. I think it's really good and use it regularly and I think it's not fair to say that others should provide content.

what happens when ai scrappers no longer have info to scrap.

funny thing - with wasm, the web won't be scrappable.

One million hits in 24 hours is only 11 TPS, if that's causing issues, then Anthropic isn't the problem, your application or hosting is.

> This anti-"scraping" hysteria is mostly profit motivated.

That seems overly reductive.

First, it sounds like you're insinuating that the people claiming the bots are causing actual disruption to their operations are lying. If that's your intent, some amount of evidence for that would be welcome.

Second, lots of people don't want their content to be used to train these models for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with money. Trying to avoid contributing to the training of these models is not the equivalent of rejecting the idea of the free exchange of information.