Unsealed Filings in NYT v. OpenAI Reveal Microsoft Exec Called AI Scraping 'the Largest Theft of Labor in Human History'

Newly unredacted information in The New York Times' three-year-old copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft includes a private admission from a top Microsoft executive describing the companies' AI training practices as theft, according to TechCrunch.

The unsealed material also says OpenAI's own leadership viewed its AI models as an "existential threat" to the publishers and journalists whose work trained them. The filing details alleged mass scraping, bypassing paywalls undetected, and stripping copyright notices from training data.

Much of the new information comes from The Times' own brief rather than the underlying exhibits, which remain sealed, and the quotes are presented without their original context.

Microsoft's own data reportedly shows its Copilot answer engine cut click-through rates for The Times' domain by as much as 93% compared to traditional Bing search. An internal Microsoft presentation from January 2024 described the decline as a "doom loop."

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that paywalled content should be licensed, and OpenAI's Nick Turley wrote internally that publishers face an existential threat from largely substitutive chatbot products. A Microsoft document warned of a "real risk" that generative AI could disrupt employment for the people whose data trained the models.

The documents reportedly reveal that OpenAI's mid-training datasets contain more than 91,692 copies of works from the Times, Daily News, and Center for Investigative Reporting, while a Common Crawl-derived dataset included over 2 million documents from nytimes.com alone. In a January 2023 memo, Microsoft's Brent Hecht called it "the largest theft of labor in human history."

OpenAI and Microsoft did not return requests for comment.

Source: TechCrunch