The artist-focused social network Cara was designed to give creators a refuge from AI training, filtering out AI-generated images and offering limited protective features. Yet preventing bulk data harvesting remains nearly impossible, as a wave of high-profile scrapes made clear in August 2025.
Beginning on August 13, Cara faced three major scraping incidents that drove up its server costs and alarmed creators who had moved there from platforms like Instagram, where content is openly available to Meta as training data. The first attack surfaced when the person responsible posted on the subreddit r/DefendingAIArt, claiming he had pulled a 12-terabyte archive of roughly 12 million works from Cara, effectively its entire library of publicly available images. Writing under the handle MandarinDawnPoppy994 in a since-deleted post, he described the effort as “a fun project” that cost him less than EUR 9.
Cara’s team learned of the breach through users tagging them. Founder Zhang said the scraper was “gloating and looking for other people to join him to do something with the dataset on Reddit,” igniting debate across AI forums about the ethics of the harvest. “I just feel it’s targeted and very hurtful,” she said, noting that “laws are not caught up on” protections against such data collection, allowing scrapers to argue their actions are technically legal. Zhang is separately involved in two ongoing class-action lawsuits brought by visual artists, one against Stability AI, Midjourney, and others, and a second against Google, both alleging that image-generator tools were trained on copyrighted work.
The Scraper Reverses Course
In an unexpected development, the individual who collected all of Cara’s art came to regret the stunt and agreed to work with Zhang on a new open-source tool intended to protect artists.
Other scrapers, however, continued to exploit Cara’s vulnerabilities and limited resources. While some AI supporters criticized the attacks on Cara, a few appeared emboldened to carry out what Zhang describes as “copycat” efforts. A second scraper pulled roughly 8.5 million links from Cara, along with metadata such as usernames, titles, and tags, then uploaded them to Hugging Face. After receiving numerous takedown requests, Hugging Face said it would notify the user, “CaptiveDreamer,” to remove the personal metadata but could not remove the URLs, since “no copies of the artworks are hosted here” and the links pointed to copies artists had published on Cara. The company added that “further copyright reports on the same basis will not change this outcome.”
Legal Fundraising and Next Steps
On August 22, a third scraper obtained 123,000 images from Cara, along with text posts and user bios containing personal information, and shared everything on a site called Academic Torrents. In response, Zhang launched a GoFundMe for legal fees with a goal of EUR 103,066, explaining that the money would fund efforts to defend Cara through cyber and copyright law. As of Thursday, she had raised more than EUR 85,889, and Cara continues to seek additional legal assistance.
