Description: In mid-March 2025, KDE’s GitLab infrastructure was disrupted by aggressive AI web scrapers originating from Alibaba IP ranges. These bots ignored robots.txt and spoofed browser headers, which in turn overwhelmed the site and caused outages for developers. Similar incidents affected other FOSS projects like GNOME, SourceHut, and Fedora. The scraping is tied to large language model training, and reportedly imposes real costs and delays.
Tools
New ReportNew ResponseDiscoverView History
The OECD AI Incidents and Hazards Monitor (AIM) automatically collects and classifies AI-related incidents and hazards in real time from reputable news sources worldwide.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Alibaba , Unnamed generative AI companies , KDE , GNOME , GitLab instances , SourceHut infrastructure , Pagure.io (Fedora) , Websites hosting FOSS documentation or bug trackers , AI scrapers and Anubis proof-of-work systems developed and deployed an AI system, which harmed FOSS projects and communities , KDE , GNOME , SourceHut , Fedora , Inkscape , Curl , Linux Weekly News , Read the Docs , Diaspora and Sysadmins.
Alleged implicated AI systems: KDE , GNOME , GitLab instances , SourceHut infrastructure , Pagure.io (Fedora) , Websites hosting FOSS documentation or bug trackers , AI scrapers and Anubis proof-of-work systems
Incident Stats
Incident ID
1001
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2025-03-17
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
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.tx…
Software developer Xe Iaso reached a breaking point earlier this year when aggressive AI crawler traffic from Amazon overwhelmed their Git repository service, repeatedly causing instability and downtime. Despite configuring standard defensi…
Variants
A "variant" is an AI incident similar to a known case—it has the same causes, harms, and AI system. Instead of listing it separately, we group it under the first reported incident. Unlike other incidents, variants do not need to have been reported outside the AIID. Learn more from the research paper.
Seen something similar?
Similar Incidents
Did our AI mess up? Flag the unrelated incidents
Wikipedia Vandalism Prevention Bot Loop
· 6 reports
Game AI System Produces Imbalanced Game
· 11 reports
Biased Sentiment Analysis
· 7 reports
Similar Incidents
Did our AI mess up? Flag the unrelated incidents
Wikipedia Vandalism Prevention Bot Loop
· 6 reports
Game AI System Produces Imbalanced Game
· 11 reports
Biased Sentiment Analysis
· 7 reports