AO3 Clone ao3.life Goes Dark After 2,000 DMCA Takedowns in a Day

A 17-year-old developer in India who goes by Ganesh ran a swarm of AI agents across 40 virtual machines to scrape fanfiction during an Archive of Our Own outage last week, launched a clone called ao3.life, and by Monday evening had pulled it offline. 404 Media reported that fanfic writers buried the site in more than 2,000 DMCA takedown requests in a single day.

The site offered scraped works as EPUB downloads for e-readers and as AI-generated audiobooks, with the first three minutes free and the rest paywalled. Ganesh's pitch to authors was a 91/9 revenue split, with the 9% covering 'narration and processing' costs. According to the reporting, ao3.life drew 126,592 unique users in its first 24 hours and sold 'like 11 audiobooks' before the takedowns landed.

Authors mobilized on Bluesky. 'I had everything archive locked on ao3 and it's still all here and I as the author have 0 control over any of my fics on there,' one writer posted. AO3's privacy controls do not reach data a third party has already scraped.

In his shutdown note, Ganesh wrote: 'In the time this site has been up, I've facilitated over 2,000 takedown requests. It was never my intention to hurt so many authors - and I'm truly sorry to you all.' On the audiobooks he was more blunt: 'Why did I charge for AI Slop audiobooks? I doubt anyone knows how expensive it is to run a server like this, especially with the amount of usage this site got.'

The clone appeared during an AO3 outage the Organization for Transformative Works later described as a security incident with no data lost. It is the latest turn in the scraping fights we have been tracking under copyright, from the NYT and Tribune suit against Brave this week to the broader training-data disputes.