in San Francisco, OpenClaw seems to be everywhere. Even, potentially, in some places it’s not intended for. According to posts ON social mediait appears that people are using the viral AI tool to crawl websites and access information, even when the websites have taken explicit measures to prevent bots.
One way they allegedly do this is through an open-source tool called Scrapling, which is designed to bypass anti-bot systems like Cloudflare Turnstile. While Scrapling, which was built in Python, works with many types of AI agents, OpenClaw users seem to particularly like this software. On Monday, viral posts promoting Scrapling as a tool for OpenClaw users began spreading on X. Since its launch, Scrapling has been downloaded more than 200,000 times.
“No bot detection. No selector maintenance. No Cloudflare nightmares,” reads one viral post about the open source tool this week. “OpenClaw tells Scrapling what to extract. Scrapling handles hiding.”
Cloudflare isn’t thrilled. The company has already blocked previous versions of Scrapling as users of the open source software tried to bypass anti-scraping protections. This week, the company was working on a patch for the latest iteration of Scrapling. “We make changes, and then they make changes,” says Dane Knecht, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer. He says the company has an advantage because of its wealth of website data and the ability to track trends.
“We already had a signal that they were starting to acquire a greater ability to bypass us,” Knecht says. “The Security Operations engineering team has already been working on the new mediation set.”
Vast language models were trained on the Internet, a process that required a lot of scraping. In a sense, Scrapling users are following in the footsteps of the original model builders, but on a more individualized scale.
Over the last few years, website owners have tried to implement additional bot protections to block software like Scrapling or find ways to make money from bots trying to access their sites. Cloudflare, in turn, is working strenuous to block increasingly powerful bots that try to bypass these protections.
Cloudflare offers its customers additional tools that block AI bots unless the bots pay for access. In less than a year, the company blocked 416 billion unwanted scraping attempts.
“I didn’t know what I was getting into.”
As Scrapling has gained popularity in recent days, cryptocurrency enthusiasts have capitalized on the attention by launching the $Scrapling memecoin. Karim Shoair, who claims to be the sole creator of Scrapling, posted about memecoin on X (these posts have since been deleted). After the price skyrocketed for about five hours, $Scrapling quickly fell off a cliff as users sold out their stakes. “A bunch of fucking fraudsters,” reads one of the comments on the Pump.Fun website where the coin is located.
“I didn’t know what I was getting into when people produced this coin and I supported it,” Shoair says in a direct message to WIRED. “But once I found out, I wanted nothing to do with it, and the money I withdrew earlier would go to charity, I wouldn’t benefit from it anyway. Or maybe I’d just leave it to waste.”
Following the event, the unofficial GitHub Projects Community account, which has over 300,000 followers on X, deleted its posts from this week highlighting the open source Scrapling software and appeared to distance itself from the project. “We do not endorse, promote or engage in crypto assets, token offerings, trading activities or cryptocurrency-based fundraising activities,” it said in a post tardy Monday evening.
Cryptocurrency forays aside, most software leaders still see agents and autonomous AI tools as the future of the web. Even Cloudflare’s Knecht, whose work includes blocking bots from taking data without their permission, wants to build a world where people and agents consume data online and the wishes of website owners are respected. “I see a path to an Internet that will be friendly to both agents and people,” he says.
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