“Nonetheless, without any obvious hints of irony, OpenAI’s own terms of use prohibits scraping.”
Microsoft just banned scraping of its AI services. In the same couple of weeks its affiliate OpenAI shipped GPTbot to scrape the entire internet. LinkedIn, also Microsoft, won a permanent injunction to stop hiQ Labs from scraping public profiles forever. The data belongs to users, yet a terms-of-use page turns it into corporate property, and courts enforce it as a contract nobody signed.