How AI poisoning is fighting bots that hoover data without permission

Gone are the days when the web was dominated by humans posting social media updates or exchanging memes. Earlier this year, for the first time since the data has been tracked, web-browsing bots, rather than humans, accounted for the bulk of web traffic. Well over half of that bot traffic is from malicious bots, hoovering up personal data left unprotected online, for instance. But an increasing proportion comes from bots sent out by artificial intelligence companies to gather data for their models or respond to user prompts. Indeed, ChatGPT-User, a bot powering OpenAI's ChatGPT, is now responsible for 6 per cent of all web traffic, while ClaudeBot, an automated system developed by AI company Anthropic, accounts for 13 per cent.