Roblox Corporation has confirmed allegations posted by 3D asset side Open3DLab that one of its AI agents downloaded 145.5 GB of content like art assets and 3d models, including adult content hosted on its subsidiary sites Smutlab and SFMLab. The company is now letting the public know that the AI agent has been decommissioned, and the gathered data will not be used in training any AI models.
A company spokesperson confirmed the news in a statement provided to GameDeveloper.com. The spokesperson affirmed claims made by Open3D admin "Salaryman" that a Roblox researcher built an AI agent to "collect publicly available 3D assets," which "mistakenly" scraped content from Open3DLab. The bot was "failing to operate as intended," they said.
"The agent was decommissioned, and the data was not used for any purpose, including training any AI models. We are strengthening safeguards for how agents like this are built and reviewed, and will continue to do so as the agentic landscape evolves."
Developers and game industry professionals interested in the technical process employed by the Roblox bot will find much to chew over in Salaryman's post. Apparently the crawler "walked through" almost every project across the three hosting sites, and downloaded "1,027 files from 712 projects." These files were all created and uploaded by Open3DLab users, which include 3D artists and creatives using Valve's Source Filmmaker software, many of whom use Smutbase and SFMLab as trusted resources for adult content.
According to Salaryman, the AI agent downloaded 117.4 GB worth of adult content from SmutBase and SFMLab. It did so after retrieving the site's robots.txt file, which contains instructions for web crawlers. It "did not respect" the instructions in that file and "ignored" Open3DLabs' Terms of Service, which forbid scraping. He also said the bot "defied" many creators' non-commercial licenses, many of which are used on models based on other company's intellectual property. These included models of the character Eve from Shift Up's Stellar Blade and Mei from Blizzard Entertainment's Overwatch.
Open3DLab spotted the crawler on October 18, blocking its attempts and emailing the agent's creator (which identified based on an email address in the agent's data). It resumed scraping activity on October 19, evading efforts by site operators to stop its work. Salaryman said it identified the bot's creator as a Roblox Corporation researcher who was an author of the paper defining the company's core generative AI system "Cube." Other details in the bot's data identified it as an agent gathering models for the purpose of AI dataset training.
Use of adult assets would violate Roblox's terms of service #
Before Roblox Corporation confirmed to GameDeveloper.com that none of the Open3DLabs assets would be used in its training data, Salaryman raised a concern that the adult content downloaded could make its way into the company's AI training data, meaning it might be used by Roblox users using the company's generative AI tools. Users who create adult content with said tools would then be in violation of Roblox's terms of service.
"Models reproduce what they learn from. If adult training data reaches a model that generates assets for Roblox, the only thing between that data and children is whatever filter Roblox builds afterwards, because its data collection didn't filter anything," Salaryman pointed out. He stressed that Open3DLab doesn't think Roblox's creators set out to collect adult content. "But that is exactly the problem: as far as our logs show, nobody checked. A crawler working for a company whose platform tens of millions of children use was pointed at an adult site, and it took explicit models without telling them apart from anything else.
As he observed, the risk of scraped adult content making its way into AI training data would add to long-running concerns about Roblox's moderation of sexualized content and the proliferation of sexual predators targeting Roblox's young playerbase. Roblox Corporation has aggressively boosted its moderation efforts throughout 2026 to the point that, according to analysis by investment research firm Bleecker Street Research, it negatively impacted user growth.
But despite the improvements, Roblox Corporation remains bogged down in litigation with government entities and parents of exploited minors over allegations that it enabled sexual harassment and exploitation of its users. The company has repeatedly denied these claims. Roblox CEO David Baszucki has also faced criticism for his rhetoric on the topic after pushing back against reporters' questions on child safety in multiple interviews.
Salaryman stressed that Open3DLab and its sister organizations are supportive of adult content on the internet, noting that it's "our bread and butter." "We think consenting adults should be able to access and enjoy this content freely, without the government looking over their shoulder," he explained.
"What we object to is our adult sites being emptied into an exploitative gaming company's training data without anyone asking, and being mixed into content offered to literal children."
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