Scraping the anti-AI art platform Cara cost under ten dollars
On August 14, 2026 photographer Jingna Zhang shared on Instagram that a Reddit user had posted "I scraped all of Cara, an anti-AI art platform! Was a fun project" in r/DefendingAIArt; the post was deleted and the user banned. According to PetaPixel, the Redditor claimed just over 12 terabytes at a cost of under ten dollars; AsiaOne reported roughly 12 million images belonging to more than a million users. Zhang started Cara in 2023 as a safe space for artists to share work without it being scraped for AI; she says it already had anti-bot and anti-scraping measures, a robots.txt telling bots not to scrape for AI and an opt-out from federated services. Zhang said: "A door not being bank vault-strong isn't an invitation to violate."