Newly unsealed court filings from the long-running copyright lawsuit brought by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft have revealed striking internal admissions. A top Microsoft executive privately described AI content scraping as “the largest theft of labor in human history,” while OpenAI leadership acknowledged that their generative models pose an “existential threat” to news publishers and journalists whose work trained them.
The documents detail how the tech giants allegedly bypassed paywalls undetected, deliberately stripped copyright notices, and amassed millions of articles from sources like the Times to train their systems. Furthermore, internal Microsoft data showed that its AI answer engine caused a drop of up to 93% in click-through rates for the publication, undercutting the companies’ legal defense that AI training constitutes permissible “fair use” without harming the original market.
These revelations threaten to dismantle key pillars of the AI industry’s legal strategies regarding training data. As courts scrutinize the economic impact of generative AI on essential content suppliers, the case could force a major industry-wide shift toward formal licensing agreements.
- Microsoft and OpenAI internal docs reveal acknowledgment of copyright harm
- Execs allegedly used hacks to bypass paywalls and strip copyright notices
- Microsoft data showed AI search tools slashed publisher web traffic by 93%
- Findings challenge AI firms’ fair use defense in ongoing copyright battles
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