Microsoft exec called AI scraping ‘the largest theft of labor in human history,’ new unredacted filings reveal
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New unredacted filings in The New York Times’ copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal internal descriptions of AI scraping as theft and AI products as a threat to publishers and journalists. The filings allege that the companies bypassed paywalls, mass-scraped content, and removed copyright notices from training data, although much of the new material comes from The Times’ brief while the underlying exhibits remain sealed. The disclosures challenge parts of OpenAI’s fair-use defense: Microsoft data showed Copilot reduced click-through rates to nytimes.com by as much as 93% compared with traditional Bing, and internal communications described chatbots as largely substitutive. Microsoft documents also warned that generative AI could disrupt the employment of the people whose work supplied training data, while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that paywalled content should be licensed and that he would have required retraining if he had known it was scraped. The documents indicate that OpenAI’s mid-training datasets contained more than 91,692 copies of works from The New York Times, Daily News, and Center for Investigative Reporting, while a Common Crawl-derived dataset contained over 2 million documents from nytimes.com. They also describe Project Mango as containing at least 160,903 unique works from the publishers and recount an alleged plan to evade The New York Times’ paywall. In a 2023 memo, Microsoft’s Brent Hecht called the copying an “astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” and “the largest theft of labor in human history”; OpenAI and Microsoft did not comment.
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