Hi Copilot, what is Project Anubis ?
MICROSOFT Copilot Answer
“Project Anubis” can refer to two very different initiatives: one is an open‑source software tool designed to deter web scraping, and the other is a research lab focused on behavioural modelling of large language models (LLMs). The name is inspired by the Egyptian god Anubis, symbolizing judgment and filtering.
🖥️ Anubis (Software Project)
- Purpose: Adds a proof‑of‑work challenge to websites before granting access, mainly to stop aggressive crawlers that ignore
robots.txt. - Origin: Created in January 2025 by developer Xe Iaso, after Amazon’s crawler overloaded their Git server.
- Mechanism:
- Uses SHA‑256 hashing challenges similar to Hashcash and Bitcoin mining.
- Clients must find a nonce that produces a hash with a set number of leading zeros.
- Difficulty can be tuned (e.g., 5 zeros solvable in seconds, 6 zeros may take minutes).
- Adoption: Popular among Git forges and open‑source projects to protect infrastructure.
- License: MIT, written in Go and JavaScript.
- Symbolism: Just as Anubis “weighs the hearts of the dead,” the software “weighs the soul of incoming HTTP requests.” Wikipedia
🧠 Project Anubbis (Research Lab)
- Focus: Behavioural science and benchmarking for large language models (LLMs).
- Mission: Build a “cognitive science of LLMs” through social experiments, moral decision‑making tests, and robust benchmarks.
- Key Research Areas:
- Emergent behaviours as systems scale.
- Comparing human vs. LLM psychology.
- Studying influence patterns (how LLMs shape beliefs and confidence).
- Security/jailbreaking benchmarks to expose vulnerabilities.
- Outputs: Benchmarks released as webpages, APIs, and Python modules, not just academic papers.
- Roadmap: Weekly experiments, presence at major AI conferences, and collaborations with AI safety groups. project-anubis.com
🎥 Other Mentions
- There is also a small YouTube channel called Project Anubis, but it appears unrelated to the software or research lab, focusing instead on entertainment content. YouTube
⚖️ Key Differences
| Anubis Software | Project Anubbis Lab |
|---|---|
| Open‑source tool to block scrapers | Research lab studying LLM behaviour |
| Uses proof‑of‑work cryptographic challenges | Runs social/psychological experiments on AI |
| Written in Go & JavaScript | Outputs benchmarks, APIs, and papers |
| Inspired by Hashcash & Bitcoin mining | Inspired by behavioural science & cognitive psychology |
Would you like me to dive deeper into the technical design of Anubis software (cryptographic proof‑of‑work) or the behavioural experiments of Project Anubbis (LLM psychology)?
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