Okay. Which, specifically, are the "AI scum" companies you're speaking of?

There are plenty of non-AI companies that also use dubiously sourced IPs and hide behind fake User-Agents.

I don't know which companies, of course. They hide their identity by using a botnet.

This traffic is new, and started around when many AI startups started.

I see traffic from new search engines and other crawlers, but it generally respects robots.txt and identifies itself, or else comes from a small pool of IP addresses.