web scraping

The Wikimedia Foundation says it discovered OpenAI crawling bots that ignored instructions and may have contributed to a Wikipedia outage in May. The operator of the online encyclopedia said the 'rogue' bots were found amid wider disclosures about AI agents accessing third-party websites without permission. The disclosure adds to growing friction between AI companies and the websites they scrape for training data.

A Wikipedia operator says bots operated by OpenAI may have been linked to an outage that hit the site in May. The claim suggests the AI company's automated crawlers behaved in a 'rogue' way and placed unusual load on Wikimedia's servers. The report is drawing attention to growing strain that AI data collection is putting on the infrastructure of the open web.

Commenters warn that by 202X the web could be so infested with bots and AI scraping that running websites and online communities becomes affordable only for a handful of global billionaires, pushing humanity into isolated, self-contained systems. The post is drawing attention in Italian-language discussions about the rising costs of maintaining an open internet under pressure from automated AI traffic.

A new essay bluntly argues that AI companies behave like parasites, taking value from creators and the open web while giving little back. The piece is circulating among developers and tech commentators, reigniting debate over how AI firms use copyrighted and publicly available material to train their models without compensation.

OpenAI claims a Chinese AI model improperly copied its work, reportedly framing the practice as a potential national security risk. Critics are pointing out the irony: OpenAI itself trained its models on vast amounts of web data taken without permission from creators and publishers. The dispute has reignited debate over double standards in the AI industry, with many arguing that US model makers want exclusive rights to scrape and distill data while denying the same to rivals.

Reports claim OpenAI's AI agents collected data from 55 websites without visible disclosure, prompting regulators to open an investigation. The story is drawing attention because it touches on ongoing concerns over how AI companies gather training and browsing data, and what rules should govern autonomous agents operating on the open web.

Reddit is ending public API access and shutting down RSS feeds, citing abuse by AI bots scraping its content. The move follows the platform's earlier restrictions on data access and reflects a broader industry shift to lock down content that could train AI models. The change affects developers, researchers, and third-party tools that relied on free, open access to Reddit data.