I worked a company that used product data from our competitors (you can debate the morals of it, but everyone is doing it). Our crawlers were set up so that each new line of requests came from a new IP… I don’t recall the name of the service, and it was not that many unique IP’s but it did allow our crawlers to live unhindered…

We didn’t do IP banning for the same reasoning, but we did notice one of our competitors did not alter their IP when scraping us. If we had malicious intend, we could have changed data around for their IP only. Eg. increasing the prices, or decreasing the prices so they had bad data…

I’d imagine companies like OpenAI has many times the IP, and they’d be able to do something similarly… meaning if you try’n ban IP’s, you might hit real users as well… which would be unfortunate.