Court Filing Shows Microsoft Exec Compared AI Training Scraping to “Theft”
Newly unsealed filings in The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft have revealed previously undisclosed admissions about AI training data practices. According to the filings, a top Microsoft executive privately described the companies’ scraping of content to train AI models as “theft,” while OpenAI leadership acknowledged that its models posed an “existential threat” to publishers whose work was used for training.
The documents also detail how the companies allegedly bypassed paywalls, built training datasets through mass scraping, and deliberately stripped copyright notices from training data. Microsoft applied science director Brent Hecht wrote in a January 2023 internal memo that the practice was “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” and “the largest theft of labor in human history.” OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, said internally that products like the chatbot were “largely substitutive” and would become more so as they improved.
The filings cite Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s deposition testimony that paywalled content should be licensed by anyone who wants to use it, and that if he had known OpenAI scraped and trained on paywalled information, he would have required OpenAI to retrain its models. Microsoft’s own data showed that its Copilot “answer engine” reduced click-through rates to The New York Times’ domain by as much as 93% compared with traditional Bing search, an internal presentation described as a “doom loop.”
The newly unsealed material also reveals for the first time that OpenAI’s mid-training datasets contained more than 91,692 copies of works from The New York Times, Daily News, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, while a Common Crawl-derived dataset included more than 2 million documents from nytimes.com. The filing says OpenAI employees devised a plan to get around the Times’ paywall without detection and stripped copyright notices before data reached the model. Much of the new information comes from the Times’ own brief rather than underlying exhibits, which remain sealed. OpenAI and Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment.
