Scanner believed to be linked to Roblox collected 145.5 GB of data without permission

    The “Open3DLab” 3D modeling community has accused a web crawler it believes is linked to the “Roblox” gaming platform of collecting data without permission. The program, which automatically browses websites to collect data, downloaded 145.5 GB of data from the “Open3DLab,” “SFMLab” and “SmutBase” catalogs. The downloaded materials belonged to 712 projects and included complete copies of 1,027 files. The community believes the files were taken to train or test an artificial intelligence model. However, it also emphasizes that it cannot prove this.    The incident came to light on October 18, when the crawler sent a large number of requests to the site and its download system. Over 34 hours, the program sent 26,429 requests and recorded almost the entire catalog of 18,926 projects. The requests came from a single address on the “Amazon AWS” service. The information sent by the crawler to identify itself listed a “Roblox” email address. The program ignored the “robots.txt” file, terms of use and creator licenses prohibiting data collection.    Most of the downloaded materials were projects marked as adult content. A total of 364 files belonging to 224 projects were taken from the “SmutBase” website. Their total size was 54.8 GB. Another 62.6 GB of material from 345 projects marked as adult content was downloaded from the “SFMLab” catalog. “Open3DLab” believes that “Roblox” did not collect this content intentionally. Nevertheless, the logs show that the files were not screened beforehand.    The community detected the activity that same day and blocked the crawler’s access the following morning. Despite this, download attempts continued on October 19, with only a brief pause around noon. The requests decreased on October 20 and later stopped entirely. Restrictions on the free servers slowed the download speed. Although “Open3DLab” requested an explanation regarding the matter, “Roblox” did not respond. The community subsequently strengthened the site’s defenses.    The phrase “3D foundation model research” appeared in the crawler’s identifying information. The community links this to the “Roblox Cube” project. In March 2025, “Roblox” released a foundational generative artificial intelligence system called “Roblox Cube,” designed to create 3D models. A beta version of the “4D generation” technology, which can build game models using natural-language commands, was launched in February 2026. The email address listed by the crawler is said to belong to one of the researchers named in the “Roblox Cube” research.