I assume he was using Gemini the same way as he was Claude when I make the following statement.
I don’t believe it’s exceptionally unique or new that companies will revoke access if you are using an unpublished API that the apps use. I don’t see anything wrong with it myself. If you want, pay for normal token use on the published APIs. There is no expectation that you can use APIs for an application, even if you are a paid user, that are not published explicitly for usage.
Indeed, that's why Anthropic, OpenAI and other LLM providers are known to adhere to published APIs to gather the world's data, obeying licensing and ROBOTS.txt.
It's truly disgusting.
I was under the impression that they do obey robots.txt now? There are clearly a lot of dumb agents that don’t, but didn’t think it was the major AI labs.
After 3 years of pirating and scraping the entire world by doing the above, I guess they have everything that they now need or want.
So then it's better to start obeying ROBOTS.txt as a ladder pull through a "nicely behaved" image advantage.
Obeying robots.txt (now) is still better than not obeying it, regardless of what they did before.
The alternative is to say that bugs shouldn’t be fixed because it’s a ladder pull or something. But that’s crazy. What’s the point of complaining if not to get people to fix things?