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in san francisco, It seems so OpenClaw is everywhere. And even, potentially, some places it wasn’t designed to be. according to Supports on Social mediaIt looks like people are using the virus Artificial intelligence tools To scrape websites and access information, even when those websites take explicit anti-bot measures.
One way they allegedly do this is through an open source tool called Scrapling, which is designed to bypass anti-bot systems like Cloudflare Revolving door. While Scrapling, which is built using… PythonWorks with multiple types of Artificial intelligence agentsOpenClaw users seem to be particularly fond of the software. On Monday, viral posts promoting Scrapling as a tool for OpenClaw users began circulating on X. Since its release, Scrapling has been downloaded more than 200,000 times.
“No bot detection. No locator maintenance. No Cloudflare nightmares,” said a viral post this week about the open source tool. “OpenClaw tells Scrapling what to extract. Scrapling handles the stealth.”
Cloudflare is not enthusiastic. The company has already banned previous versions of Scrapling, due to… Open source software Keep trying to get around scratch protections. This week the company was working on a patch for the latest version of Scrapling. “We make changes, and then they make changes,” says Dane Knecht, chief technology officer at Cloudflare. He says the company’s website data set and ability to track trends gave it the upper hand.
“We’re already getting a signal that they’re starting to get a higher ability to get around us,” Knecht says. “The Security Operations Engineers team was already working on a new set of mediations.”
Large language models were trained on the Internet corpus, and the process involved a lot of extraction. In a sense, Scrapling users are following in the footsteps of archetype creators, but on a more individual scale.
Over the past few years, website owners have tried to put in place additional protections against bots, either to block programs like scrapling or to find a way to make money from bots that try to access their sites. In return, Cloudflare is working overtime to continue blocking increasingly powerful bots that attempt to get around these protections.
In July 2024, Cloudflare began offering additional tools to its customers that block AI crawlers, unless the bots pay for access. The company in less than a year Claims It has blocked 416 billion unwanted scraping attempts.
“I didn’t know what I was getting into”
With Scrapling gaining momentum in recent days, encryption Enthusiasts capitalized on the interest by launching $Scrapling com. memecoin. Karim Shair, who claims to be the sole developer of Scrapling, made a post about memecoin on X (those posts have since been deleted). After the price skyrocketed for about five hours, $Scrapling quickly fell off a cliff as users sold their stakes. “A bunch of fucking scammers,” said one comment on the Pump.Fun website, which hosts the currency.
“I didn’t know what I was getting into when people made that currency and I endorsed it,” Shair says, in a direct message with WIRED. “But once I found out, I didn’t want anything to do with it. The money I withdrew before will go to charity, and I won’t benefit from it in any way. Or I might just let it go to waste.”
In the fallout from this event, the unofficial account for the GitHub projects community, which has more than 300,000 followers on X, has deleted its posts from this week highlighting the open source Scrapling software, and appears to be distancing itself from the project. “We do not support, promote, or engage in crypto assets, token offerings, trading activities, or cryptocurrency-based fundraising,” she said in a post late Monday night.
Cryptocurrency forays aside, most software leaders continue to see agents and autonomous AI tools as the future of the web. Even Cloudflare’s Knecht, whose work includes preventing bots from non-consensual scraping, wants to build toward a world in which humans and agents benefit from online data and the wishes of website owners are respected. “I see a path forward toward an Internet that is both customer-friendly and human-friendly,” he says.
This is an edition of Will Knight Artificial Intelligence Lab Newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.