AI Incident Database: LLM Scrapers Allegedly Target Multiple Open Source Projects Disrupting the FOSS Ecosystem
In mid-March 2025, KDE's GitLab infrastructure was reportedly disrupted by aggressive AI web scrapers originating from Alibaba IP ranges. These bots allegedly ignored robots.txt and spoofed browser headers, which in turn purportedly overwhelmed the site and caused outages for developers. Similar incidents reportedly affected other FOSS projects like GNOME, SourceHut, and Fedora. The scraping is allegedly tied to large language model training, and reportedly imposes real cost…
AI Incident Database · Incident 1001Operator lens (medium): inspect D3 (data handling), D4 (observability), D5 (model change gate).
Event summary
In mid-March 2025, KDE's GitLab infrastructure was reportedly disrupted by aggressive AI web scrapers originating from Alibaba IP ranges. These bots allegedly ignored robots.txt and spoofed browser headers, which in turn purportedly overwhelmed the site and caused outages for developers. Similar incidents reportedly affected other FOSS projects like GNOME, SourceHut, and Fedora. The scraping is allegedly tied to large language model training, and reportedly imposes real cost…
Linked entities
- alibaba
organisation | 70%
- generative-ai-developers
organisation | 70%
- sysadmins
organisation | 70%
- sourcehut
organisation | 70%
- read-the-docs
organisation | 70%
- linux-weekly-news
organisation | 70%
- kde
organisation | 70%
- inkscape
organisation | 70%
- gnome
organisation | 70%
- foss-projects-and-communities
organisation | 70%
- fedora
organisation | 70%
- diaspora
organisation | 70%
- curl
organisation | 70%
Related graph edges
| Edge | Type | Confidence |
|---|---|---|
| ent-aiid-alibaba to ent-psf-d3 | maps to | 60% |
| ent-aiid-alibaba to ent-psf-d3 | maps to | 60% |
| ent-aiid-alibaba to ent-psf-d3 | maps to | 60% |
| ent-aiid-alibaba to ent-psf-d4 | maps to | 60% |
| ent-aiid-alibaba to ent-psf-d4 | maps to | 60% |
| ent-aiid-alibaba to ent-psf-d4 | maps to | 60% |
| ent-aiid-alibaba to ent-psf-d5 | maps to | 60% |
| ent-aiid-alibaba to ent-psf-d5 | maps to | 60% |
| ent-aiid-alibaba to ent-psf-d5 | maps to | 60% |
| ent-aiid-alibaba to ent-psf-d8 | maps to | 60% |
| ent-aiid-alibaba to ent-psf-d8 | maps to | 60% |
| ent-aiid-alibaba to ent-psf-d8 | maps to | 60% |