Anubis (software)

Anubis is a software program that adds a proof of work challenge to websites before users can access them, in order to deter web scraping. It has been adopted mainly by Git forges and free and open-source software projects.^[4][5]

Anubis
The page shown by Anubis during its challenge.
Original author	Xe Iaso
Developer	Techaro[1]
Initial release	January 19, 2025; 9 months ago (2025-01-19)[1][2]
Stable release	1.22.0[3]  / 6 September 2025; 46 days ago (6 September 2025)
Repository	github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis
Written in	Go, JavaScript[1]
License	MIT License
Website	anubis.techaro.lol

Anubis was created by Xe Iaso in response to Amazon's web crawler overloading their Git server, as the crawler did not respect the robots.txt exclusion protocol and would work around restrictions.^[4][6]

Adoption

It is used by a number of projects, including:^[7]

• The GNOME Project's GitLab instance^[4]
• The Linux kernel mailing list archives^[1] and Git server^[8]
• sourceware.org^[7]
• FFmpeg^[1][6]
• FreeBSD
• FreeDesktop
• Wine^[9]
• UNESCO^[6]
• The Science Olympiad Student Center^[9]
• Enlightenment^[9]
• FreeCAD^[10]
• Krantenbank Zeeland
• ScummVM^[11]

Criticism

Tavis Ormandy noted that the cost of scraping websites protected by Anubis is likely negligible: "I don’t think we reach a single cent per month in compute costs until several million sites have deployed Anubis."^[12]