Roblox Crawler Downloaded 145.5 GB of Models from Open3DLab Sites Ignoring robots.txt and Licenses
Roblox researchers harvested 145.5 GB of user-generated 3D assets, including substantial adult content, without permission or regard for licenses. The action aligns with Cube model development timelines and exposes gaps in consent mechanisms for training data. Sites responded with blocks; Roblox has not commented.
The crawler retrieved 18,926 project pages in 26,429 requests over 34 hours before downloading full assets. It ignored the sites' robots.txt, violated Terms of Service prohibitions on scraping, and bypassed 423 non-commercial licenses. Activity occurred during CEST office hours, paused for lunch, and resumed after blocks were applied. No reply came from the [email protected] address listed in the user agent.
Server logs show the same IP previously associated with a Roblox researcher listed among 40-plus authors of the March 2025 Cube 3D foundation model paper. Cube's training set included 1.5 million assets from Objaverse and opted-in Creator Store items. The scrape sampled adult and non-adult projects at equal rates, directly contradicting stated reliance on licensed data only.
The incident extends documented patterns of foundation-model teams harvesting community repositories without consent, as seen in earlier LAION-5B and Common Crawl audits. Adult content inclusion raises separate liability vectors under platform policies and EU data-protection rules. Operationally, sites must now implement per-project license enforcement and IP-based rate limiting rather than relying on user-agent strings or robots.txt.
Open3DLab has blocked the range and will publish full log analysis. Roblox has not issued a statement as of 20 October 2026. Future crawls from the same infrastructure will trigger automated legal notices and public disclosure of any continued requests.
Roblox Legal: No public statement or dataset audit disclosure within 30 days of 20 October 2026.
Sources (3)
- [1]Primary Source(https://open3dlab.com/news/roblox-downloaded-145-gb-of-models-from-our-sites/)
- [2]Cube 3D Foundation Model Paper(https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.XXXXX)
- [3]Objaverse Dataset Documentation(https://objaverse.allenai.org/)