Microsoft Called AI Scraping 'Largest Theft in Human History': Filing — SkimNews
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- Brent Hecht, Microsoft's Director of Applied Science, called AI scraping "the largest theft of labor in human history" and "an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions" in a January 2023 internal memo, according to unredacted filings in The New York Times' copyright suit.
- A separate January 2024 Microsoft presentation by Hecht warned that Copilot had caused click-through rates to nytimes.com to drop as much as 93% versus traditional Bing search — a "doom loop" that would "hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time."
- OpenAI Head of ChatGPT Nick Turley wrote internally that publishers face an "existential threat" from products that are "largely substitutive" and "will get more and more substitutive as they get better," directly undercutting the companies' fair use defense.
- Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified under oath that paywalled content "should be licensed by anyone who wants to use it" and that he would have invoked Microsoft's right to force retraining had he known OpenAI scraped behind paywalls.
- Filings reveal OpenAI's mid-training datasets contain over 91,692 copies of works from NYT, the Daily News, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, with a Common Crawl-derived dataset holding more than 2 million nytimes.com documents alone.
- OpenAI President Greg Brockman allegedly responded "ah nice" when researcher Nick Ryder told him about a "hack to get around nytimes paywall," and the filing describes deliberate efforts to strip copyright notices so models "wouldn't want" to output them to users.
- The unsealing lands weeks after the Trump administration filed a brief defending OpenAI's unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train its LLMs, sharpening the stakes as courts weigh whether such training constitutes fair use.
Why it matters: The unsealed language gives The New York Times concrete ammunition against the fair use defense: Microsoft's own 93% click-through collapse figure and "doom loop" framing demonstrate market substitution rather than transformation, while Nadella's testimony that paywalled content must be licensed contradicts his company's public posture. With the Trump administration simultaneously backing OpenAI's unlicensed training, publishers now face a court and political landscape tilted against their licensing demands.
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