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Open3DLab says Roblox crawler downloaded 145GB of 3D models
Open3DLab said a crawler identifying itself as Roblox copied 145.5 GB of 3D files from its sites, including adult projects, and that Roblox has not replied.
- New headline Was: “Roblox downloaded 145GB models from us (including adult content) without asking”
- Our desk filed its story
- open3dlab.com is now reporting this
The operators of Open3DLab, SFMLab and SmutBase said a web crawler that identified itself as belonging to Roblox copied 145.5 gigabytes of 3D files from their sites on Oct. 15 and 16, including adult material, and that Roblox has not answered their emails1.
In a post dated Oct. 26, Open3DLab said the crawler used the user agent trellis2-data-sourcing/1.0, listed a roblox.com email address, and ran from a single Amazon Web Services address1. It said the bot requested the main pages of 18,926 projects in 26,429 requests over 34 hours, then downloaded 1,027 files from 712 projects1.
Of those projects, 345 were adult content totaling 62.6 GB, including 364 files from 224 projects on SmutBase, which the operators described as adult-only, they said1. They said 423 of the 712 projects were licensed for non-commercial use only, that the crawler retrieved robots.txt but did not follow it, and that their terms of service forbid scraping1.
Open3DLab said staff noticed the traffic on Oct. 18, blocked further attempts that morning, and emailed the address in the user agent1. It said the crawler resumed Oct. 19 and 20, was blocked, and that a second email also went unanswered1. The operators said they take the user agent at face value but noted anyone can spoof one and that the requests came from Amazon's cloud, not a Roblox network they could identify1.
The post said Roblox has publicly described Cube, a generative 3D system, and that the user-agent string may refer to Microsoft's TRELLIS.2 3D model, but that this is speculation1. "We think the most likely explanation is that the crawler was collecting training or evaluation data for Roblox's 3D foundation model work," the operators wrote, adding they cannot prove any files entered a model1.
Open3DLab asked Roblox whether it ran the crawler, what the data was for, why robots.txt and licenses were ignored, whether adult sites were reviewed, and whether copies will be deleted1. WhatsNewPaper could not independently verify the logs and found no public comment from Roblox on the claim.
