Vibe Coded AO3 Clone Site Down After Fanfic Authors Buried It With 2,000 Takedown Notices in a Single Day

A vibe-coded site called ao3.life that scraped Archive of Our Own fanfiction, reuploaded the works and charged for AI-generated audiobooks went down Monday evening after its creator, who identified himself as a 17-year-old from India named Ganesh, said he received over 2,000 takedown requests from authors in the single day it was up. The site used AI agents controlling 40 virtual machines to scrape works, offered EPUBs and audiobooks paid after the first three minutes, and claimed authors would receive 91% of profits. AO3 has been down since Thursday following a security incident and is expected to be offline for as long as four weeks, according to the Organization for Transformative Works, which says no data has been lost.