Comment by jerf

"what do AI companies have more than everyone else? compute"

"Everyone else" actually has staggering piles of compute, utterly dwarfing the cloud, utterly dwarfing all the AI companies, dwarfing everything. It's also generally "free" on the margin. That is, if your web page takes 10 seconds to load due to an Anubis challenge, in principle you can work out what it is costing me but in practice it's below my noise floor of life expenses, pretty much rolled in to the cost of the device and my time. Whereas the AI companies will notice every increase of the Anubis challenge strength as coming straight out of their bottom line.

This is still a solid and functional approach. It was always going to be an arms race, not a magic solution, but this approach at least slants the arms race in the direction the general public can win.

(Perhaps tipping it in the direction of something CPUs can do but not GPUs would help. Something like an scrypt-based challenge instead of a SHA-256 challenge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt Or some sort of problem where you need to explore a structure in parallel but the branches have to cross-talk all the time and the RAM is comfortably more than a single GPU processing element can address. Also I think that "just check once per session" is not going to make it but there are ways you can make a user generate a couple of tokens before clicking the next link so it looks like they only have to check once per page, unless they are clicking very quickly.)