Microsoft exec called AI scraping ‘the largest theft of labor in human history,' new unredacted filings reveal
techcrunch.com • • business
Key Points:
- Newly unsealed information in The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveals internal admissions that AI training practices amounted to “theft” and pose an “existential threat” to publishers and journalists.
- The companies allegedly bypassed paywalls undetected, mass scraped content, and removed copyright notices from training data, using millions of articles including over 2 million from nytimes.com in their datasets.
- Internal Microsoft data shows AI products like Copilot caused up to a 93% drop in click-through rates to The New York Times, highlighting the technology’s substitutive effect and harm to publishers’ revenue.
- Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella acknowledged paywalled content should require licensing for training, and OpenAI leadership admitted AI models directly compete with original news sources, threatening the economic foundations of content creators.
- The lawsuit intensifies ongoing legal debates over fair use in AI training, with new evidence challenging the defense that AI use does not substitute or harm the market for original copyrighted works.
