tl;dr: TheNumbers.com, the film industry's go-to box office database, was taken offline in March 2026 after months of being hammered by AI scrapers and, likely, a targeted intrusion—possibly by someone trying to front-run Polymarket's box office prediction markets. Founder Bruce Nash opted not to restore the 30-year-old site's 160,000 legacy files, instead rebuilding from scratch. The incident highlights how agentic AI has made small-site attacks cheap while AI crawlers (Anthropic hits ~38,000 pages per referred visitor) are breaking the open web's traffic-for-content bargain.