OpenAI will have to deal with a lot of lawsuits in the future. Robots.txt may not be legally binding but disobeying it after claiming otherwise would go a long way towards establishing intent.

I mean, under the CFAA you could probably pretty easily pursue charges when explicitly deauthorizing certain agents from accessing your data. Plenty of people have been threatened and prosecuted for less.

https://www.nacdl.org/Landing/ComputerFraudandAbuseAct

I mean, you could just block OpenAI’s crawlers’ IP addresses, if you wanted to