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 costs and delays.