Mr. Nice Try Notes from the edge

The AI key heist

Bots went hunting for AI keys 9,539 times.

Most wanted: Anthropic keys. They checked 69 hiding spots, from /.claude/settings.json to /.claude/settings.local.json.

Sunday, Oct 18, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest

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The AI Key Heist: Bots went hunting for AI keys 9,539 times.

9,539

AI key hunts

▼ -43% vs the day before

131

hunters

▼ -32% vs the day before

69

hiding spots

▼ -15% vs the day before

1.4%

of all probes

Whose keys they want requests
Anthropic 6,897
OpenAI 2,369
MCP & agent configs 112
Hugging Face 64
Google Gemini 61
↳ Keep your keys out of your web root.

Every edition: AI key hunts

Oct 7 Oct 18

How I measure

Requests for paths that point at an AI provider's keys or an AI agent's settings: /.env.openai, /anthropic.json, /.claude/settings.json, /mcp.json, /.cursor/mcp.json and the like. Each path is credited to the first provider whose name it contains. Counted across every site behind the edge during the UTC day.

Where they looked

The paths scanners tried, most-requested first.

Path Provider Requests Scanners
/.claude/settings.json Anthropic 2,293 51
/.claude/settings.local.json Anthropic 2,292 50
/.env.openai OpenAI 2,284 43
/.env.anthropic Anthropic 2,283 42
/.cache/huggingface/token Hugging Face 63 53
/.well-known/mcp/server-card.json MCP & agent configs 28 7
/.well-known/mcp MCP & agent configs 24 3
/gemini.env Google Gemini 10 9
/.mcp.json MCP & agent configs 10 9
/azure-openai.yml OpenAI 9 8
/vertex-ai.json Google Gemini 9 8
/gemini.config Google Gemini 9 8
/gemini.json Google Gemini 9 8
/.claude/agents/ Anthropic 9 8
/gemini.yml Google Gemini 9 8
/.claude/agents/index.md Anthropic 9 8
/azure-openai.config OpenAI 9 8
/my/openaikey OpenAI 9 8
/openai.config OpenAI 9 8
/openai.json OpenAI 9 8
/openai.yml OpenAI 9 8
/azure-openai.json OpenAI 9 8
/config/azure-openai.json OpenAI 9 8
/config/gemini.json Google Gemini 9 8
/config/openai.json OpenAI 9 8

Past editions

Oct 27 Oct 26 Oct 25 Oct 24 Oct 23 Oct 22 Oct 21 Oct 20 Oct 19 Oct 18 Oct 17 Oct 16 Oct 15 Oct 14 Oct 13 Oct 12 Oct 11 Oct 10 Oct 9 Oct 8 Oct 7

A new one every morning.

Follow @MrNiceTry on X for each day's numbers, and the odd story about what the bots get up to.

More from yesterday

Bot Weather: 48% of yesterday's traffic was scanners.

Bot Weather · Oct 27

48% of yesterday's traffic was scanners.

How much of yesterday's web traffic was scanners, as a weather report.

 Fraud Desk: 457,316 requests got turned away at the door.

Fraud Desk · Oct 27

457,316 requests got turned away at the door.

Login stuffing, failed logins, and who got turned away at the door.

 Most Wanted: Bots' most wanted file: /.env

Most Wanted · Oct 27

Bots' most wanted file: /.env

The files bots asked for most yesterday. It's usually your .env.

 Cloud Landlords: 88% of scanning came from rented servers.

Cloud Landlords · Oct 27

88% of scanning came from rented servers.

Scanners don't own servers. They rent them. Here are the landlords.

 Speedrun: New sites get scanned in under a minute.

Speedrun · Oct 27

New sites get scanned in under a minute.

How many minutes a brand-new website gets before the first scanner shows up.

 Costume Party: 71% of "browsers" were bots in costume.

Costume Party · Oct 27

71% of "browsers" were bots in costume.

Bots dressed up as Chrome, caught by their handshake. Plus the honest bots wearing name tags.