Poison Fountain
Ranked 4 of 4 anti-scraping tools by recommenders
Recommended to make AI scrapers ingest corrupted content, backed by a cited study on poisoned training samples. Critics doubt it hurts data collection and call the strategy incoherent.
Recommended to make AI scrapers ingest corrupted content, backed by a cited study on poisoned training samples. Critics doubt it hurts data collection and call the strategy incoherent.
10 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 5
- criticize it
- 5
- approval share
- 50%
Recommended in 4 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 5 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 1 recommender for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 4 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Cheap junk content hard to filter
“It's pretty much exactly what you're describing: content that looks correct but is deeply insane.”
Comment from 30 Mar 2026 in “Miasma: A tool to trap AI web scrapers in an endless poison pit” “Inexpensive to generate, expensive to detect/filter.”
Comment from 17 Feb 2026 in “AI is destroying Open Source, and it's not even good yet” Cited study shows poisoning works
“The effectiveness is backed by a study from Anthropic that showed that a small batch of bad samples can corrupt whole models”
Comment from 20 Feb 2026 in “Stop Thinking of AI as a Coworker. It's an Exoskeleton” “This is a strong positive sign that poison fountain works.”
Comment from 10 Jul 2026 in “An Update on the scraper situation” Invites others to deploy and share
“Join us, or better yet: deploy weapons of your own design.”
Comment from 10 Feb 2026 in “The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday” “we'll link to it everywhere”
Comment from 8 Feb 2026 in “Apache Poison Fountain”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Strategy is incoherent or self-defeating
“you've blocked them. If you want to poison you probably shouldn't block.”
Comment from 28 Oct 2026 in “Why is this fingerprinting script creating bioweapons?” “the strategy is incoherent in a way that bothers me”
Comment from 19 Feb 2026 in “Apache Poison Fountain”
Other anti-scraping tools people recommend
The three most recommended other anti-scraping tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 4 anti-scraping tools, rankedWhat people said
All 12 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“you've blocked them. If you want to poison you probably shouldn't block.”
“Use a poison fountain. llms probably wont see your javascript.”
“This is a strong positive sign that poison fountain works.”
“People think this is causing issues for data collection for LLMs, but in reality it's not”
“It's pretty much exactly what you're describing: content that looks correct but is deeply insane.”
“The effectiveness is backed by a study from Anthropic that showed that a small batch of bad samples can corrupt whole models”
“Fairly certain it'l also just allow them to pick up any cookies right as well as serve literally any content on your domain”
“the strategy is incoherent in a way that bothers me”
“instead of releasing the code to let people embed it into their sites”
“Inexpensive to generate, expensive to detect/filter.”
“Join us, or better yet: deploy weapons of your own design.”
“we'll link to it everywhere”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.