The Ai scrapers are most likely vc funded and all they care about is getting as much data as possible and not worry about the costs.

They are hiring machines at scale too so definitely bandwidth etc. are cheaper for them too. Maybe use a provider that doesn't have too much bandwidth issues (hetzner?)

But still, the point being that you might be hosting website on your small server and that scraper with its machines beast can come and effectively ddos your server looking for data to scrape. Deterring them is what matters so that the economical scale finally slide back to our favours again.

Maybe my statement wasn't clear. The point is that the server operators pay for all of the bandwidth of access to their servers.

When this access is beneficial to them, that's OK, when it's detrimental to them, they're paying for their own decline.

The statement isn't really concerned with what if anything the scraper operators are paying, and I don't think that really matters in reaching the conclusion.