signalTechCrunch AI2026-09-18
Microsoft exec called AI scraping ‘the largest theft of labor in human history,’ new unredacted filings reveal
Unredacted filings in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal a Microsoft exec privately called AI scraping "the largest theft of labor in human history," with internal documents showing Copilot cut NYT click-through rates by up to 93% versus Bing, and OpenAI's mid-training datasets containing over 91,692 copyrighted copies. Microsoft's Brent Hecht described the traffic decline as a "doom loop," while OpenAI leadership admitted chatbots are "largely substitutive" and pose an "existential threat" to publishers, directly undercutting the firms' fair-use defense and highlighting deliberate paywall bypassing and stripping of copyright notices.
- why now
- New unsealed filings: AI theft
- topic
- AI Industry Impact
- source
- TechCrunch AI
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