Anthropic's Web Crawlers Overwhelm Sites, Sparking Backlash

Anthropic, the AI firm behind Claude, has sharply increased its web crawling operations, causing significant strain on website infrastructure and angering operators. Reports indicate the company's bots are making hundreds of thousands of requests in short periods, often ignoring established web protocols designed to manage automated traffic.

The surge has caught many site administrators unprepared. Servers are being hit with request volumes that can slow performance for actual visitors. Unlike traditional search engine crawlers from Google or Bing, which carefully throttle their activity, Anthropic's bots—identified as 'ClaudeBot' or 'anthropic-ai'—show less restraint. Crucially, multiple webmasters report the crawlers sometimes bypass robots.txt directives meant to block them, leading to technical workarounds like IP blocking.

The core issue is the hunger for training data. AI models like Claude need vast amounts of text to improve, making web scraping a key resource. However, website owners bear the cost of serving this data—bandwidth and server resources—without the reciprocal benefit of search engine traffic. This one-sided exchange is seen by many publishers as exploitative.

Pushback is mounting. The SEO community is sharing technical strategies to identify and block AI crawlers, while major publishers are pursuing legal avenues. The New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI sets a precedent that could apply to Anthropic. In Europe, regulations like the AI Act offer content owners more tools to opt out of such scraping.

The situation underscores a broader conflict about value and ownership on the web. If AI companies freely absorb content without compensation, the economic model supporting online publishing weakens. The outcome hinges on evolving legal rulings, potential regulations, and whether new technical standards emerge to address this new generation of web crawlers. For now, website owners are advised to audit their server logs and strengthen their blocking measures.