Microsoft Executive Called AI Scraping "the Largest Theft of Labor in Human History," Unredacted Filings Reveal

The filings detail how the companies allegedly obtained content by bypassing paywalls and deliberately stripping copyright notices from training data. One Microsoft document describes a "doom loop" where Microsoft's Copilot "answer engine" caused click-through rates for The New York Times' domain to drop by as much as 93% compared to traditional Bing search results. A Microsoft director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, noted in the document that the situation creates a threat to the economic foundations of the essential suppliers for the LLM business.

OpenAI leadership also acknowledged the impact on the media industry. OpenAI's head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, stated in internal communications that publishers face an "existential threat" from products that are "largely substitutive" of original content. OpenAI President Greg Brockman also described the models as "excellent at news," while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that interacting with chatbots often substitutes the need to visit the underlying source website.

The scale of the data usage is significant. The documents reveal that OpenAI’s mid-training datasets alone contained over 91,692 copies of works from The New York Times, Daily News, and the Center for Investigative Reporting. Additionally, a dataset derived from Common Crawl included more than 2 million documents from nytimes.com alone.