Anubis

Anubis is an open-source Web AI Firewall Utility built by Techaro, designed to protect websites from the flood of requests sent by AI crawlers and scraper bots. Written in Go and released under the MIT License, it sits in front of upstream resources and challenges incoming connections before allowing them through. The project was created on GitHub in March 2025 and has since attracted significant community interest, with the repository listing over 19,000 stars as of its latest data.

What It Is

Anubis acts as a reverse-proxy challenge layer — it "weighs the soul" of incoming HTTP requests (a reference to the Egyptian god Anubis and the weighing of souls) using one or more proof-of-work or browser-based challenges. If a connection passes the challenge, it is forwarded to the upstream service; if not, it is blocked. The README describes it as "a Web AI Firewall Utility" specifically designed to help protect the small internet from the endless storm of requests that flood in from AI companies.

How It Works

When a request arrives, Anubis presents a challenge page — typically a JavaScript-based proof-of-work task — that legitimate browsers can solve but automated scrapers generally cannot. The tool is designed to be as lightweight as possible so that small communities and self-hosted services can afford to run it. Key behavioral notes from the README:

• Configurable bot policy definitions allow explicit allowlisting of "good bots" such as the Internet Archive
• The project is working on a curated set of known-good bots to balance discoverability with uptime
• The README notes it is "a bit of a nuclear response" and may block smaller scrapers and inhibit some legitimate crawlers
• For most use cases, Cloudflare is suggested as a simpler alternative; Anubis is positioned for situations where Cloudflare cannot or will not be used

Deployment Model

Anubis is self-hosted and deployed as a Go binary in front of any HTTP upstream. It is distributed as open-source source code on GitHub and is also tracked by Repology across multiple Linux distribution package repositories, indicating broad packaging availability. Configuration is handled through bot policy definition files.

Update: v1.25.0 "Necron"

The latest release is v1.25.0, named "Necron," published on February 18, 2026. The running instance on the project's own documentation site reports version v1.25.0-51-gb57508a, indicating active development commits beyond the tagged release. The repository was last pushed to in May 2026, showing ongoing maintenance.

Sponsorship and Community

Anubis is funded through GitHub Sponsors and Patreon. The README lists Diamond-tier sponsors including Raptor Computing Systems and Databento, and Gold-tier sponsors including Gitea, Weblate, and others. Live community support is available through a Patron Discord channel. The mascot design is credited to CELPHASE on Bluesky, and the project is made in Canada by Techaro.