NiceTryBot REAL HUMANS ONLY

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.

Edition of Sunday, Oct 18, 2026 (UTC) · see the latest · updated every 24 hours

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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 13 Nov 11

How we 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 NiceTryBot 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

Nov 11 Nov 10 Nov 9 Nov 8 Nov 7 Nov 6 Nov 5 Nov 4 Nov 3 Nov 2 Nov 1 Oct 31 Oct 30 Oct 29 Oct 28 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

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