New evidence in The New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveals shocking internal admissions: Microsoft execs called AI data scraping “theft,” while OpenAI leaders warned their models pose an “existential threat” to publishers. Documents show the companies bypassed paywalls, stripped copyright notices, and built massive datasets—some containing over 90,000 copies of news articles and more than 2 million from The Times alone. Microsoft’s Copilot reportedly slashed NYT traffic by 93%, with one memo calling it a “doom loop.” CEO Satya Nadella admitted he’d have forced OpenAI to retrain if he knew they used paywalled content, while OpenAI’s ChatGPT head echoed the existential risk, calling AI models “largely substitutive.” This undermines the “fair use” defense and exposes a massive, legally murky data grab.
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Sources:
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/microsoft-exec-called-ai-scraping-the-largest-theft-of-labor-in-human-history-new-unredacted-filings-reveal/
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