TikTok's parent launched a web scraper that's gobbling up the world's online data 25-times faster than OpenAI
Briefly

ByteDance's Bytespider bot has emerged as one of the most aggressive web scrapers, operating at a data collection rate significantly higher than that of its competitors, scraping at over 25 times the rate of OpenAI's GPTbot and 3,000 times that of ClaudeBot from Anthropic.
The significant increase in Bytespider's scraping activity has been noted over the past six weeks, suggesting a systematic push by ByteDance to gather data at an unprecedented scale, despite concerns regarding TikTok's potential ban in the U.S.
Kasada's CEO, Sam Crowther, highlights the notable efficiency of Bytespider in accumulating data for AI training, reflecting ByteDance’s ambition to enhance its generative AI capabilities amidst mounting regulatory pressures.
ByteDance's aggressive scraping activities raise questions about ethical data usage, particularly as its Bytespider bot does not adhere to 'robots.txt,' the standard protocol for web scraping, potentially implicating it in questionable data acquisition methods.
Read at Fortune
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