Microsoft director: AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history' — SkimNews
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- The New York Times filed a legal brief seeking summary judgment in its late-2023 copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, citing sealed or redacted internal documents showing both companies' leadership were aware of potential market harm from AI scraping.
- Microsoft director of Applied Science Brent Hecht wrote in a January 2023 internal memo that large models 'hoovering up' content is 'the largest theft of labor in human history' and called the situation a 'doom loop' that would 'hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time.'
- Microsoft's own data showed Copilot dropped click-through rates to The New York Times by as much as 93% compared to Bing search, with another internal Microsoft document stating 'almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.'
- OpenAI Head of ChatGPT Nick Turley described ChatGPT as an 'existential threat' to publishers in internal communications, calling them 'largely substitutive' that 'will get more and more substitutive as they get better,' while another OpenAI engineer testified that 'no matter how prominently we show the links, users won't click.'
- OpenAI researcher Nick Ryder told company president Greg Brockman about a 'hack to get around nytimes paywall,' to which Brockman replied 'ah nice.'
- Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that paywalled content 'should be licensed by anyone who wants to use it…for grounding or training' and said if he 'had been made aware that OpenAI has scraped and trained on information that was behind a paywall,' he would have required OpenAI 'to retrain its models.'
Why it matters: The NYT brief's internal documents show Microsoft and OpenAI leadership explicitly acknowledged market harm from AI scraping — including a 93% drop in NYT click-throughs from Copilot vs. Bing. That documented awareness, not abstract speculation, now sits at the center of OpenAI's fair use defense, with another court already ruling Anthropic's scraping fell under fair use.
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