Cara is an artist and social platform built by a small group of volunteers to give artists a home where their consent is respected. Our premise is a simple one, because we know we can’t easily change the world. But still we wanted to build a platform that at the very least, isn’t training AI models on its users’ work without consent, nor giving away their images to be scraped for generative AI training without their knowledge. Our terms of service forbids unauthorized scraping.

Starting August 13th, Cara has been subjected to a string of scraping attacks. Scrapers online cheered, gloated, and argued about how this was all perfectly legal. These actions were not only violating the consent of artists and hurt our community deeply, it also caused financial damage to Cara, resulting in thousands of dollars in server bills and legal fees, with no recourse available to us because we don’t have the financial means to do more.

The first scrape was for 12M images, the second for 9M URLs, and the third 123k images, as well as information such as names, locations, comments, and text posts from our users.

In an unusual turn of events, the scraper of the first attack apologized and deleted the dataset after speaking with the people at Cara. He provided information for a postmortem, built a tool to help people check if their work were scraped in the second attack, and attempted to get the second scraper to remove the dataset, to no avail. The targeted attacks from others continued.

While scraping can happen to anyone online, anywhere, the difference is Cara has gone out of its way to opt out. When many platforms either officially allow scraping, or have data troves much more massive than Cara, the end goal here does nothing but harass and inflict pain. All because we went out of our way to say no.

We believe that artists who want to share their work with the world should get to do so without people violating their consent. We don’t want to be bullied into making Cara a members-only platform because of people who believe "consent isn’t always valid".

These scrapers feel safe because they know we can’t afford getting help. So we are asking our community, will you come together? Please help us make taking legal action possible.

Other platforms may not care about these things because artists are easy targets to bully. No one really stands with us, we are usually alone. But we don’t want what’s happened to become encouragement for open season on artists, just because it seems like we’re powerless. The world is messed up, but we don't want to give up without trying.

We want to pursue any and all legal avenues available. The funds raised will be used exclusively for legal related fees and activities, we will contact lawyers with expertise in both cyber and copyright law, to consult on legal options, both for Cara and its artists and users, and in carrying out legal actions and covering any related expenses required of us in association with these efforts. Any funds in excess will be preserved for future legal efforts and activities in continuing to fight for artists. We will not be using the funds to cover our damages in server costs.

Please help us keep Cara open, please help us defend our home.

Jingna Zhang

Founder, Cara

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On the fundraise goal:

As of now, we do not know how much is needed as a target goal because we lack information that cannot be obtained unless we begin the legal process. Early consultations so far suggest that $120k is a starting number, and we're recommended to seek out more major donors or find pro-bono help, as we may require comms assistance because I have not slept or rested much for a single day for 3 weeks straight since everything started, and I am physically unable do this for much longer, especially given the attacks and accusations from the artist community. It is not clear to us how much more we'll need until we retain council and start the process. We are leaving the number at $120k for now but hope that more donations come through. If the actual goal is too impossible, we will update again.

Please read the GoFundMe page updates and our Scraping & Legal Fund FAQ & Info Page for the most recent status & updates on the GFM.

Incident Timeline:

Cara's legal fund is dedicated to pursuing legal avenues and actions to defend against the active, ongoing attacks on Cara.

For clarification: Heft started publicly helping Cara community's users before and during the second scraping attack. His act of building and paying for Lantern as an independent, open-source project, is not affiliated with Cara. Heft is not part of the Cara team, he does not have access to Cara’s code, he does not touch Cara’s codebase, he does not have access to Cara's systems. He is not paid in any way by Cara or the GoFundMe. He is, by himself, paying for Lantern as apology for the thousands in server fees he incurred Cara. Lantern is publicly available, for all to inspect, examine, and contribute to. It is meant to benefit all artists and creators, including beyond the Cara community. Cara continues its legal efforts in the way described in this GoFundMe.

Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2026/08/23/artists-built-a-site-to-escape-ai-scrapers-are-coming-for-it-anyway/

Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/he-scraped-art-from-cara-for-ai-now-he-is-collaborating-on-a-tool-to-help-them/