The platform Cara faced three scraping attacks for AI training; the person behind the first offered to help protect artists

The platform for artists Cara, which positions itself as a safer alternative to networks like Instagram and offers protective features including Glaze, a tool against AI imitation of artistic styles, faced a series of three large-scale scraping attacks in August 2026. According to the Wired report, on 13 August, the user MandarinDawnPoppy994 began by posting a 12-terabyte archive containing approximately 12 million works on Reddit (the subreddit r/DefendingAIArt) — practically the entire publicly accessible library of Cara. By his own account, downloading the data cost him less than 10 USD; Zhang, the founder of Cara, learned about the attack from users who alerted her to the post.

After the first archive was published, two more attacks followed, which Zhang describes as “copies” inspired by the first. The user CaptiveDreamer downloaded 8.5 million links to works along with metadata (usernames, titles, tags) and uploaded them to Hugging Face. Although Hugging Face agreed to delete personal metadata after a wave of removal requests, it refused to remove the links to the works themselves on the grounds that it hosts no copies of the works and that the links point to the originals published on Cara. The third attack took place on 22 August, when an unknown attacker published 123 000 images along with text posts and user profiles containing personal data on Academic Torrents.

In response, Zhang launched a GoFundMe fundraiser with a target of 120 000 USD for legal fees associated with defending against scraping; according to Wired, it had raised over 100 000 USD by the Thursday before the article was published. Cara introduced temporary measures such as a login gate, but Zhang considers them only a partial solution to a long-term problem affecting the entire internet — she points out that Cara had probably been scraped before and that larger platforms are scraped even more, so leaving Cara does not in itself guarantee safety.

An unexpected development is that the person behind the first attack, who goes by the nickname “Heft” (a student in North America with a background in software and an interest in digital archiving), regretted his actions after being confronted by Zhang, deleted the dataset and apologized. By his own account, he originally intended the attack only as a technical project, but decided to publish it as “ragebait” on Reddit, underestimating its impact on the artist community. He has now decided to work with Zhang on developing a new open-source tool to protect creators.