OpenAI bot overwhelms e-commerce site with data scraping
OpenAI's web scraping bot caused the e-commerce site Triplegangers to go offline over a weekend, reportedly using over 600 IP addresses to collect data for training ChatGPT. The site owner described the effect as similar to a DDoS attack and the company incurred higher infrastructure costs from the incident.
What happened
The online store Triplegangers became inaccessible over a weekend after investigation by site administrators identified OpenAI's web scraping bot as the cause.
Engineers counted over 600 IP addresses used by OpenAI's bot to rapidly copy information from the site. CEO Oleksandr Tomchuk stated: 'Their bot simply crushed our server. It was like a DDoS attack.'
Beyond the site outage, Triplegangers incurred significantly higher bills from Amazon, its web infrastructure provider.
Reported impact
The e-commerce site was inaccessible for a period of time and the company faced substantial additional infrastructure costs.
Index analysis
The incident reflects the scale at which OpenAI's data collection operates, using over 600 IP addresses simultaneously to scrape content.
OpenAI states it respects robots.txt restrictions, though other AI companies including Perplexity have been found processing data regardless of robots.txt parameters set by websites.
Governance controls
Specialists recommend that online sites introduce restrictions in robots.txt files for AI company bots to mitigate such incidents.
Classification
Sources and evidence
Sources not yet published
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