A software developer, known as Aaron, has developed a new form of malware called Nepenthes to combat AI crawlers that ignore robots.txt instructions. These crawlers, including those from Anthropic and Reddit, have been hitting websites excessively, with one site reporting over 30 million hits from a single AI crawler. Nepenthes uses a tarpit strategy, trapping AI bots in an endless loop of static files, causing them to waste resources and potentially poisoning AI models with gibberish data. Despite its aggressive nature, Nepenthes has successfully trapped all major web crawlers except for OpenAI’s, which managed to escape. This development marks a significant escalation in the ongoing battle between website owners and AI companies over web scraping practices.
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