I have also thought about this extensively, but haven't really come to any real useful insights. A few ideas I have considered: 1. Embrace the bots and get eac

I have also thought about this extensively, but haven't really come to any real useful insights. A few ideas I have considered: 1. Embrace the bots and get each request (with response) super lightweight. Anything you can pre-compute, pre-compress, pre-cache is great. I've used this successfully for a small service that can scale significantly. 2. Make the cost of interacting with your service computationally expensive. For example, you could send off a problem to be solved which becomes itself a token to make one interaction. There are several problems that are computationally expensive to compute, but easy to verify. 3. Make the cost of interacting with your service require sending a significant payload - the idea being that if they launch many requests from a single network, they saturate their network. If to watch a 100MB Youtube video you had to send 1MB of random data via UDP (used to fingerprint), I suspect people abusing your service would soon find they experience dropped packets. If they struggle to send 1MB of random data, there's a good chance they would have trouble downloading 100MB of data. 4. A lot of these AIs falsify information to appear plausible. You could abuse this to ask questions, some real some false, and brief the user to answer randomly on the nonsensical questions. For example, "How many connections are there in a tripoduplex?" Something like chatGPT may see tokens for "tri" and "du" and output 3 or 2. There would also be a way to do this with images, i.e. "Select all of the cats in the image and press done", where they are all some weird trip of images. These are just some ideas and there are obvious flaws in some of them.