AI bots overwhelm open podcast feeds, breaking RSS

Open podcast infrastructure is breaking under an autonomous AI assault. The Podcast Index API is now receiving millions of requests per hour from bots like Open Claw, as agents scrape RSS feeds to fuel synthetic podcasts no human hears. Dave Jones of Podcasting 2.0 describes this as the inevitable worst use of the technology. He says the human-centric web is being crowded out by a gamified data collection race.

This bot swarm is forcing a standards showdown. Some, like Podnews’s James Cridland, advocate deprecating legacy transcript formats like SRT in favor of the more modern VTT. Jones argues this is futile. He calls such legacy formats "podcast herpes," impossible to eradicate once they’ve achieved adoption in the wild. Removing them would only break the apps listeners still use, making the index less accurate.

The structural solution may be decentralization. Jones is building a peer-to-peer Gossip Protocol where nodes share new podcast data in a swarm, eliminating the central API bottleneck. The model relies on delegated trust; a malicious node can be revoked by the community. The goal is a standalone podcast app that operates entirely within this swarm, immune to bot attacks.

This crisis mirrors a broader AI land grab. OpenAI’s reported $100 million acquisition of The Big Podcast Network signals labs moving to control their own media channels. As AI reshapes content creation, its infrastructure demands are breaking the old distribution pipes.

Dave Jones, Podcasting 2.0:

- As soon as you capture the ability to harness nuclear power, you guaranteed a course of human history where a nuclear bomb was inevitable.

- The technology itself leads in some way to its worst abuse.

Dave Jones, Podcasting 2.0:

- As soon as you put a format into the spec, it becomes this thing that you'll never get rid of.

- It's like podcast herpes; you can just sort of hide and pretend it doesn't exist and scratch a lot.