Vibe-coded AO3 clone hit with 2,000 takedowns
The gist
Creator Ganesh's ao3.life got over 2,000 author takedown requests in one day and went down.
Fan writers quickly pushed back against their scraped, resold work.
How it unfolded
- Oct 29, 2026AO3 went down following a security incident, according to owner OTW; the site is expected to be down for as long as four weeks, and OTW says no data has been lost.
- recentlyao3.life sprang up after the announced outage, scraping works with AI agents across 40 virtual machines and offering EPUBs and paid AI audiobooks, with authors promised 91% of profits.
- recentlyThe creator said the clone drew 126,592 unique users in 24 hours, consumed terabytes of bandwidth and sold about 11 audiobooks.