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Strava said developer applications are up more than 400% thanks to AI, which is putting a strain on its system.
Jun 1, 2026 13:18 EDT
Strava, the popular fitness tracking platform and social network that athletes use to record runs and share workouts, decided that it's had enough and is putting public data behind a paywall and a login screen to stop AI companies from hammering its servers. This comes after the company issued a ban in November 2024 to prevent developers from using any data obtained via Strava's API to train AI models (obviously, the AI companies just worked around that ban).
According to a post on its developer hub, in recent years, AI companies have heavily abused the platform by aggressively harvesting user data to provide no-code AI tools that generate apps that hammer its APIs, driving total developer applications to its program "up 448% year-to-date." This relentless scraping activity has degraded site performance for regular users.
