Unredacted Filings: Microsoft Called AI Scraping 'Theft of Labor'
Newly unredacted filings in The New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft show executives privately called AI training data scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history.'
What the filings reveal
Newly unredacted material in The New York Times' three-year-old copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft shows both companies' leadership privately acknowledged what they were doing. In a January 2023 internal memo, Microsoft's director of applied science called the practice "an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions" and "the largest theft of labor in human history."
93% fewer clicks
Microsoft's own data showed its Copilot "answer engine" cut click-through rates to the Times' domain by as much as 93% versus traditional Bing search; a January 2024 internal presentation described a "doom loop" that would hurt the models and "the entire web at the same time."
The numbers — and the defense
Per the filing, OpenAI's mid-training datasets alone hold more than 91,692 copies of works from the Times, Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting, with over 2 million Times documents in a Common Crawl-derived set. The companies did not comment; the Times' exhibits remain sealed, and courts have so far leaned toward "fair use."