It’s unclear how much damage tarpits or other AI attacks can ultimately do. Last May, Laxmi Korada, Microsoft’s director of partner technology, published a report detailing how leading AI companies were coping with poisoning, one of the earliest AI defense tactics deployed. He noted that all companies have developed poisoning countermeasures, while OpenAI “has been quite vigilant” and excels at detecting the “first signs of data poisoning attempts.”
Despite these efforts, he concluded that data poisoning was “a serious threat to machine learning models.” And in 2025, tarpitting represents a new threat, potentially increasing the costs of fresh data at a moment when AI companies are heavily investing and competing to innovate quickly while rarely turning significant profits.
“A link to a Nepenthes location from your site will flood out valid URLs within your site’s domain name, making it unlikely the crawler will access real content,” a Nepenthes explainer reads.
Mojeek too.