AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt

Software developer Aaron, who is anonymous and was granted anonymity by Ars Technica, built Nepenthes, a tarpit that traps AI crawlers that ignore robots.txt in an endless maze of static files with no exit links, where they can be fed gibberish data meant to poison AI models. Aaron says Nepenthes can trap all major web crawlers except OpenAI's, and he hopes it will raise AI companies' costs. Gergely Nagy later built Iocaine, which he says killed off about 94 percent of bot traffic to his site, while critics on Hacker News argued that most crawlers could easily avoid such tarpits.