What is anthropic-ai ?
The user-agent “anthropic-ai” is associated with Anthropic, an AI research company known for building the Claude family of language models. This bot is used to crawl publicly accessible web content to support the training of large language models. Although Anthropic does not provide detailed public technical documentation for this crawler, its existence is confirmed by industry watchdogs and bot detection platforms such as DataDome.
Who is operating anthropic-ai ?
The bot is operated by Anthropic PBC, an American AI research company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and positions itself as a safety-focused organization. More information about its mission and AI philosophy can be found at anthropic.com.
Why you should be interested in anthropic-ai ?
Webmasters should be aware that anthropic-ai is involved in the collection of web data for training purposes. While Anthropic claims to prioritize responsible AI development, their crawler’s behavior may not always be transparent. It is important to monitor access logs and define whether or not your content should be included in future AI training corpora. The crawler’s presence has been documented on multiple web infrastructure monitoring services, and it reportedly does not always respect robots.txt rules (source: DataDome).
How to block anthropic-ai ?
1. robots.txt File :
Add the following rule to your robots.txt file
# block anthropic-ai User-agent: anthropic-ai Disallow: /
2. User-Agent Filtering:
Configure your web server (Apache, Nginx, etc.) to reject requests with the user-agent “anthropic-ai”.
3. Firewall/IP-level Blocking:
Although Anthropic has not disclosed IP ranges, server admins may analyze access logs to implement additional blocking mechanisms if necessary.
About the bot
Owner: Anthropic PBC
Owner URL: anthropic.com
Bot URL: anthropic.com
Bot User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; anthropic-ai; +https://www.anthropic.com)
Respects robots.txt: Yes
