Microsoft exec called AI scraping ‘the largest theft of labor in human history,’ new unredacted filings reveal
Unredacted filings in the New York Times v. OpenAI and Microsoft copyright case reveal internal admissions calling AI training data scraping 'theft'.
Newly unsealed material in the three-year-old NYT copyright lawsuit quotes Microsoft's Brent Hecht calling AI scraping 'an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions' and 'the largest theft of labor in human history.' Internal data showed Microsoft's Copilot answer engine cut NYT click-through rates by up to 93% versus Bing, and OpenAI datasets reportedly contained 91,692 copies of the plaintiffs' works plus over 2 million nytimes.com documents. Employees allegedly bypassed NYT paywalls and stripped copyright notices from training data, while Satya Nadella testified that paywalled content should be licensed for training. The admissions cut against OpenAI's fair-use defense, which the Trump administration recently supported in a brief.