We're sorry: you've hit a rate limit

To prevent such abuse, we've put in place strict rate limiting. If you're seeing this as a human, we want to apologize for the inconvenience. We hope you'll keep using OpenSanctions once we're able to process your query again.

Bot blocking is only activated when our usage shows suspicious peaks. If your computer has been blocked, you will be able to access the site again in one hour.

Context

We're not the only ones having this issue: the internet is being swamped by ever more aggressive bots, many of which seem to be operated by AI companies that want to harvest content in a technological arms race. Already, the Wikimedia Foundation is rining the alarm bell over the effect that badly-programmed bots have on the open internet.

While our hosting provider, Google Cloud, offers sophisticated bot management tools that can distinguish human and machine users, the cost for using these services at the traffic levels seen by OpenSanctions is prohibitive.