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Since January 2024, we have seen the bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content grow by 50%. This increase is not coming from human readers, but largely from automated programs that scrape the Wikimedia Commons image catalog of openly licensed images to feed images to Al models. Our infrastructure is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans during high-interest events, but the amount of traffic generated by scraper bots is unprecedented and presents growing risks and costs. The graph below shows that the base bandwidth demand for multimedia content has been growing steadily since early 2024 — and there's no sign of this slowing down. This increase in baseline usage means that we have less room to accommodate exceptional events when a traffic surge might occur: a significant amount of our time and resources go into responding to non-human traffic.