Anyone who runs a website knows how annoying AI bots are these days.
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F5Application delivery network company found that more than this Half of all web visit comes from data scrapers, not peopleOpenai, Anthropic, Google and Perplexity AI Bots.
(Disclosure: ZDNET’s original company Ziff Davis filed a case of April 2025 against Openai, alleging that it violates Ziff Davis copyright training and operating its AI system.)
Stop AI bots in their track
People are sick and are tired of wasting money on their sites, only AI companies to rip everything of value. So, a technical teacher and part-time bot fighter, XE Iyao wrote an open-source program, AnubisTo stop AI Bots in their track.
Anubis is not just such a program. In fact, IASO independently accepts that it is “basically Cloudflare. Are you a bot? (Aka cloudflare turnstyle) page, but self-pilgrimage. “It enables you to run it on your server without any fee.
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Anubis is designed to protect the websites-especially from the tireless attacks of small outfits, open-source projects and archives run by archives that threaten to overwhelm the server and increase hosting costs. The program is a web AI firewall utility. All incoming HTTP connections will have to pass through it successfully before reaching your real website.
The tongue in the cheek, the IASO describes Anubis like the god of ancient Egypt, to protect the soul of its connection from the bottom of scrapering upstream resources using one or more challenges. It needs visitors to solve a computational puzzle, which is trivial to the PC, but expensive for a scale working bot.
The system checks whether visitors behave like real browsers, using JavaScript and cookies to verify authenticity. When a bot fails these challenges, it is blocked before reaching the main resources of the website.
Anubis is an uncaptcha
Now, you can ask, “Isn’t it just a captcha? And, AI programs are not as good in solving those as people?”
This is true – they are. But as IASO says, “Anubis is an uncaptcha. It does to automatically use a lot of work to use the characteristics of your browser, which will be a captcha, and right now, the main implementation to prove it is a bunch of cryptographic mathematics with JavaScript to prove that you can run a JavaScript which can be a manner that can be a manner that can be a manner that can be a manner that can be done on a way. Is.”
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He is well aware that many people are hesitant to run JavaScript due to concerns of security and privacy. She is working on a non-jawscript version of the option, but it is not yet here. It will be a while. On a redit thread, ISO said that she is “doing a better job that does not trust JS, but Oh God, This is going to be a hell of one thing to apply.,
Anubis is written in GO and licensed under the Open-SUS MIT license. This is “designed to be as light as possible to ensure that everyone can protect their closest communities.” On average, the program uses less than 128 MB of RAM towards the server.
Most of the charge is controlled by visitors’ PCs and smartphones. Nevertheless, the end-user processing load is so low that general users will not notice. Indeed, since Abis is transparently operated, there is no captcha to click or to solve images; Most people will not even know that anything is happening.
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Proof-off-work moves in the background, and can only withstand issues with disabled with old browsers or JavaScript. This is another story for bot forms – their weight quickly connects.
In a blog, IASO says:
At a high level, Anubis has a large old set of rules In Your Bot Policy FileIf customers match a rule, they are either passed, blocked or selected for secondary screening. By default, Anubis means to stop all bleeding and work immediately and let the administrators sleep without downtime alerts. This means that it is very paranoid and aggressively challenges everything, similar to the “I am under attack” mode of the cloudflair.
My intention was that the admins would start with Anubis being quite crazy and then slowly reduce pair as they find better patterns and match ways to do things. Users use Anubis in their default configuration, but this default configuration interferes with RSS feed readers and other “good bots”.
A nuclear reaction
The result is a device that the IASO describes as “bit of an atomic reaction”.
“This will block your website with small scrapers and can prevent ‘good bots’ like the Internet Archive. You can configure the definitions of the bot policy to clearly allow, and we are working on a curate set of ‘known good’ bots to make a compromise between search and uptime,” IASO says.
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Many groups were ready for the nuclear reaction. Organizations like GNOME, FFMPEG and UNESCO have adopted Anubis to protect their online infrastructure. Since its release in January 2025, Anubis has been downloaded more than 200,000 times and many organizations are credited with helping the outage to avoid outage and reduce unwanted AI scraping burden.
According to Duke University, there is a Happy Ebis user, the school’s library system About 90 percent unwanted traffic successfully blocked And improving service performance with minimal obstruction for real users, more than 4 million unwanted HTTP requests per day.
How to install and run anubis
there are Many ways to install and run anubis,
Usually, anubis is for sitting between your reverse proxy and your target service. Currently support is free. You can access it through it Github points page Or, for live chat, join with IASO Patron And ask in Patreon Discord Channel. There is also a commercial version of Nambis BotestopperWhich, at this point, simply provides more control to organizations on the branding of the program.
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Bot promises to never end the fight between developers and defenders. The manufacturers of Anubis are updating the tool to combat the new theft strategy, such as headless browser and advanced browser fingerprinting. The goal is that we keep the Internet accessible for humans, while making it informal for derogatory bots to operate it on a scale. This is not easy.
If you find the project useful, support it. She can use all the help you can give.
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