A followup for folks who are curious about the whole AI botswarm problem...

Some of these bots are clearly running on a bunch of machines on the same net. I have been able to reduce the traffic significantly by treating everything as a class-C net and doing subnet-level throttling. That and simply blocking a couple of them.

But that leaves a lot of traffic with an interesting characteristic: there are millions of obvious bot hits (following a pattern through the site, for example) that all come from a different IP. An access log with 9M lines as over 1M IP addresses, and few of them appear more than about three times.

So these things are running on widely distributed botnets, likely on compromised computers, and they are doing their best to evade any sort of recognition or throttling. I don't think that any sort of throttling or database of known-bot IPs is going to help here...not quite sure what to do about it.

What a world we have made for ourselves...