anubis

Anubis is described by its authors as a Web AI Firewall Utility. It sits in front of an upstream web resource and, in the project's own phrasing, "weighs the soul" of each incoming HTTP connection by putting it through one or more challenges before granting access. The stated goal is to reduce the flood of automated requests that originate from AI companies and other scrapers, with a particular emphasis on protecting smaller sites and communities that cannot absorb that load. A recurring theme in the README is leanness: Anubis is intentionally kept as lightweight as possible so that even modestly resourced operators can afford to run it. It is positioned as an alternative for situations where Cloudflare is not an option, and the README suggests that many sites will not need it at all and can rely on existing CDN protection instead. The project is candid about trade-offs. The README calls Anubis "a bit of a nuclear response" that can end up blocking smaller scrapers as well as "good bots" such as the Internet Archive. To soften this, it points to configurable bot policy definitions that let operators explicitly allowlist specific agents, and mentions ongoing work on a curated set of known-good bots as a compromise between discoverability and uptime. Operationally, the repository covers the expected open-source surfaces: a documentation site at anubis.techaro.lol, a GitHub issue tracker for support requests, and a Patreon-linked chat channel for live discussion. A Repology packaging badge in the README indicates the project is distributed through multiple package repositories, and the badge set also shows the implementation language at a glance along with repository size and contributor information. The README also lists project sponsors across named tiers, which reflects ongoing funding but says nothing about the software's behaviour or quality. Everything above is drawn from the README text; no benchmark results, throughput figures, or comparative performance claims appear there.