I'm confused. Are you suggesting that the AI companies actively participate in malicious DDOS campaigns against Wikimedia, for no constructive reason?
Is there a source on this?
Not maliciousness. Incompetence.
Bot traffic is notoriously stupid, reloading the same pages over and over, surging one hour and then gone the next, getting stuck in loops, not understand html response codes... It's only gotten worse with all the AI scrapers. Somehow, they seem even more poorly written than the search engine bots.
Mine disappeared after about a week of serving them all the same dummy page on every request. They were fetching the images on the dummy page once for each time they fetched the page...