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.
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 incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.
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