Anubis: Hashcash-Style PoW Stops AI Scrapers — SkimNews
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- Anubis is a Proof-of-Work-based bot protection system inspired by Hashcash, a scheme originally proposed for reducing email spam
- The system's target is AI companies aggressively scraping websites, which administrators say causes downtime and makes resources inaccessible to everyone
- Anubis is explicitly framed as a "placeholder solution" until better fingerprinting can identify headless browsers — for example, by how they render fonts
- Once headless-browser identification matures, the proof-of-work challenge page would no longer need to be presented to users likely to be legitimate
- Anubis requires modern JavaScript features, so users running plugins like JShelter must disable them for the protected domain
Why it matters: For website administrators facing AI-driven downtime, Anubis offers a stopgap that makes mass scraping economically painful while keeping per-user cost negligible — though the project itself flags this as a placeholder until headless-browser fingerprinting can tell bots from humans without bothering legitimate users.
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