AI companies are desperate for content to train their models. They’re catching increasing flack for hammering websites and scraping every bit of written, video, and still image content on the entire internet. AI company data scrapers have been busted for everything from grabbing copyright data to more practical problems of hammering certain websites millions of times a day and ignoring robots.txt files that are used to tell bots what to stay out of.

Enter, tarpits and Nepenthes.

Building on an anti-spam cybersecurity tactic known as tarpitting, he created Nepenthes, malicious software named after a carnivorous plant that will “eat just about anything that finds its way inside.”

Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It’s not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an “infinite maze” of static files with no exit links, where they “get stuck” and “thrash around” for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models.

It’s just one more counterattack in poisoning and combating AI.

Articles:

• https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/