PrivacyMedium
LLM Scrapers Allegedly Target Multiple Open Source Projects Disrupting the FOSS Ecosystem
- Occurred
- Mar 17, 2025
- Published
- Mar 25, 2025
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
In mid-March 2025, KDE's GitLab infrastructure was reportedly disrupted by aggressive AI web scrapers originating from Alibaba IP ranges. These bots allegedly ignored robots.txt and spoofed browser headers, which in turn purportedly overwhelmed the site and caused outages for developers. Similar incidents reportedly affected other FOSS projects like GNOME, SourceHut, and Fedora. The scraping is allegedly tied to large language model training, and reportedly imposes real costs and delays.
Developers
- Alibaba
- Generative AI developers
Deployers
- Alibaba
- Generative AI developers
Harmed parties
- Sysadmins
- SourceHut
- Read the Docs
- Linux Weekly News
- KDE
- Inkscape
- GNOME
- FOSS projects and communities
- Fedora
- Diaspora
- Curl
Tags
- Data extraction
- Scraping
- Large language models
- FOSS
- Infrastructure overload
- Data misuse
- Open source
- Web crawlers
- LLM training
- DDoS
- Robots.txt
- Browser spoofing
- Systemic harm
- Unauthorized data collection
- Anubis
Classification
Category confidence: 85%
Severity confidence: 80%
Rationale: AI scrapers violating robots.txt and causing outages for FOSS projects, impacting data collection and service availability.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8