[jimmydorry]

Yes, the status quo right now is merely bandwidth... but if there was money to be made in providing a small amount of compute for the sake of solving the next gen captcha's, you can bet offerings will expand to meet it.

It's impossible to prove a negative. They could all be running secondary scrapers using malware proxies... but what we do have is plenty of evidence of them using fixed IP pools with appropriate user agents. I don't see any Chinese user agents... so two guesses who may be driving the bulk of these AI scraper requests via residential proxies.