The ClaudeBot web crawler that Anthropic uses to scrape training data for AI models like Claude has hammered iFixit’s website almost a million times in a 24-hour period, seemingly violating the repair company’s Terms of Use in the process. “If any of those requests accessed our terms of service, they would have told you that use of our content expressly forbidden. But don’t ask me, ask Claude!” said iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens on X, posting images that show Anthropic’s chatbot acknowledging that iFixit’s content was off limits. “You’re not only taking our content without paying, you’re tying up our devops resources. If you want to have a conversation about licensing our content for commercial use, we’re right here.” “The rate of crawling was so high that it set off all our alarms and spun up our devops team,” Wiens tells The Verge. “iFixit gets a lot of traffic. Being one of the internet’s top sites makes us pretty familiar with web crawlers and bots. We can handle that load just fine, but this was an anomaly.” iFixit’s Terms of Use policy states that “reproducing, copying or distributing” any content from the website is “strictly prohibited without the express prior written permission” from the company, with specific inclusion of “training a machine learning or AI model.” When Anthropic was questioned on this by 404 Media, however, the AI company linked back to an FAQ page that says its crawler can only be blocked via a robots.txt file extension. Wiens says iFixit has since added the crawl-delay extension to its robots.txt. “Based on our logs, they did stop after we added it to the robots.txt,” Wiens says.
Full report : iFixit’s CEO says ClaudeBot hit the website’s servers ‘a million times in 24 hours.’
