Microsoft Exec Called AI Scraping History's Largest Theft

Microsoft employees privately discussed whether OpenAI was involved in the "largest theft of labor in human history," according to court documents unsealed Thursday in the New York Times's copyright case against the two companies.

The unredacted filings also show OpenAI and Microsoft executives describing their AI products as substitutes for journalism, Reuters reported — language the Times and other news outlets argue guts the tech companies' fair-use defense.

In the same filing, the Times alleged OpenAI committed "an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions" by using millions of news articles to train its AI models.

What the Filings Show

Per TechCrunch, the documents show both companies scraped paywalled Times content, built datasets from it, and warned internally that the practice would gut publishers.

The New York Times, reporting on the records in its own pages, said the material captures worry inside Microsoft and OpenAI about damaging the publishing industry.