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In 2025, Tavis Ormandy estimated that the cost of scraping websites protected by Anubis is negligible: "In fact, I don’t think we reach a single cent per month in compute costs until several million sites have deployed Anubis. I’m just not convinced this math works… this is literally nothing for a soulless AI vendor with a monthly cloud services budget in the 8 figures." Ormandy demonstrates that it is technically easy to develop a native code solver, which can solve Anubis's proof-of-work challenges more quickly and efficiently than the JavaScript code that ordinary human users must run on their devices.

By contrast, Anubis imposes substantial costs on human users attempting to access the sites it protects, particularly those with older devices, on which Anubis challenges may be extremely slow and battery-depleting. The computing webzine LWN decided not to deploy Anubis itself in part because Anubis will completely "block users who turn off JavaScript" in their browsers.

LWN noted in July 2025 that "there is no guarantee that Anubis will maintain its edge against scrapers in the long run," and indeed one month later Codeberg reported that many AI scraper bots had "learned how to solve the Anubis challenges"; at the same time Codeberg praised Anubis for having offered a reliable and practical anti-bot solution for many months. Some website authors are considering using alternative measures, such as tarpits, in combination with Anubis or in place of it. The tarpits include nonsense text generated using cheap-to-compute means, such as Markov chains (as used by Iocaine), or even malicious data like zip bombs.