
Anubis
Self-hosted reverse proxy that blocks AI scraper bots with a lightweight proof-of-work challenge.
Anubis is a self-hosted "Web AI Firewall Utility" that weighs the soul of incoming HTTP requests using one or more challenges to protect upstream resources from scraper bots. Browsers must pass a proof-of-work challenge before receiving content, making large-scale AI crawling expensive while real visitors only wait a moment.
It was built to help protect the small internet from the endless storm of AI company requests, and is deliberately lightweight so that every community can afford to run it. Unlike Cloudflare, which terminates your traffic on their edge, Anubis runs on your own infrastructure as a small Go service that sits between your reverse proxy (Nginx or Caddy) and the application it protects.
Anubis is intentionally a bit of a nuclear response: by default it will block smaller scrapers and may inhibit "good bots" like the Internet Archive, but bot policy definitions let you explicitly allowlist crawlers you care about. Configuration is done through environment variables and a policy file with support for weight thresholds, Open Graph passthrough for social media previews, and per-role policies. It is packaged for common distributions and shipped as a Docker image at ghcr.io/techarohq/anubis.









