A Ukrainian-American company, Triplegangers, experienced severe website disruption when OpenAI’s web crawler attempted to scrape its entire database of 65,000 3D human model products. According to Julie Bort’s report in TechCrunch, the incident occurred when OpenAI’s bot sent tens of thousands of server requests using 600 different IP addresses.
CEO Oleksandr Tomchuk described the bot’s behavior as similar to a DDoS attack, effectively taking the seven-person company’s e-commerce site offline during U.S. business hours. The incident is expected to result in significant AWS hosting costs due to excessive CPU usage.
Triplegangers maintains the world’s largest database of human digital doubles, including 3D image files and photos used by game developers and digital artists. While the company’s terms of service prohibit unauthorized bot access, protection required specific robot.txt file configuration to block OpenAI’s GPTBot. After implementing proper bot blocking measures and Cloudflare protection, the site stabilized.
Tomchuk expressed concern about the lack of transparency regarding what data OpenAI collected and the absence of contact options for removal requests. The incident highlights growing concerns about AI companies’ aggressive data collection practices, with research showing an 86% increase in bot-related invalid traffic in 2024.