PeterStuer parent
Or some anti-ddos/bot companies using ultra cheap scraping services to annoy you enough to get you into their "free" anti bot protection, so they can charge the few real ai scrapers for access to your site.
Is there any evidence that this has actually happened?
Even if there isn't (yet?), there's probably someone who's honestly thinking this is potentially a viable business model and at least napkin-mathing it out.
My napkin mathing is that their ROI would be negative. That's a lot of compute and bandwidth they'd have to pay for even if they were just throwing away the results.
So, it hasn't happened, and you're just making stuff up.