> Does anyone know what's the deal with these scrapers, or why they're attributed to AI?

You don't really need to guess, it's obvious from the access logs. I realize not everyone runs their own server, so here are a couple excerpts from mine to illustrate:

- "meta-externalagent/1.1 +https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/craw...)"

- "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)"

- "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Amazonbot/0.1; +https://developer.amazon.com/support/amazonbot) Chrome/119.0.6045.214 Safari/537.36"

- "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; GPTBot/1.3; +https://openai.com/gptbot)"

- [...] (compatible; PetalBot;+https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot)"

And to give a sense of scale, my cgit instance recieved 37 212 377 requests over the last 60 days, >99% of which are bots. The access.log from nginx grew to 12 GiB in those 60 days. They scrape everything they can find, indiscriminately, including endpoints that have to do quite a bit of work, leading to a baseline 30-50% CPU utilization on that server right now.

Oh, and of course, almost nothing of what they are scraping actually changed in the last 60 days, it's literally just a pointless waste of compute and bandwidth. I'm actually surprised that the hosting companies haven't blocked all of them yet, this has to increase their energy bills substantially.

Some bots also seem better behaved then others, OpenAI alone accounts for 26 million of those 37 million requests.