Back to feed
News Story
The AI Insider
1 sources

Unsealed Documents Reveal Microsoft and OpenAI Executives Privately Called AI Training 'Theft'

Newly unredacted filings in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal internal admissions that executives privately viewed the companies' AI training practices as theft and an existential threat to publishers. The documents allege scraping of paywalled content, removal of copyright notices, and datasets containing over 91,000 copies of Times, Daily News, and Center for Investigative Reporting material. Microsoft's Brent Hecht reportedly called the scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history,' while Satya Nadella testified paywalled content should be licensed before training.

SynthePulse Insight · AI deep readingMembers

"The Largest Labor Theft in History": How Unsealed Documents Expose the Internal Cognitive Rift in AI Training

Version 1 · 1 source

In the New York Times' copyright case against OpenAI and Microsoft, newly unsealed documents put executives' private judgments on the table: they themselves used "theft" and "doom loop" to describe how training data was obtained. What truly deserves scrutiny is not who said harsh words, but how the gap between these internal perceptions and public positions will reshape the copyright litigation and the battle over content supply.

  • The case has lasted three years; what was disclosed this time are newly unsealed court documents, with materials drawn mainly from the New York Times' legal brief.
  • Microsoft Applied Sciences Director Brent Hecht is said to have called scraping "the largest labor theft in human history" in internal documents, and described the up to 93% drop in click traffic to Times content after Copilot's launch as a "doom loop."
  • Microsoft CEO Nadella testified that paywalled content should be licensed before training, and that had he known paywalled material was involved, he would have asked OpenAI to retrain the model.
Open section navigationA Three-Year-Old Case: Why It's Worth Revisiting Now

A Three-Year-Old Case: Why It's Worth Revisiting Now

This lawsuit has lasted three years. The change this time is not in the cause of action but in the visibility of evidence: newly unsealed documents bring previously redacted internal executive statements into public view. According to The AI Insider, the materials are drawn mainly from the New York Times' legal brief, with core allegations including: the two companies unnoticedly scraped paywalled content, built large-scale training datasets, and deliberately removed copyright notices before content entered the models.

A boundary must be drawn first: these are the Times' claims in litigation, not conclusions the court has established. The report also notes that neither company responded to requests for comment. Therefore all quotations below, unless otherwise stated, should be read as "the documents claim" or "is said to," not as confirmed facts.

Free for now

Read the full analysis

4 more sections of analysis, plus the full takeaway

Loading

Credibility boundary

All facts in this article come from The AI Insider's report on newly unsealed documents in the New York Times v. OpenAI and Microsoft case. It is a single-source relay, and the core content originates from the plaintiff's legal brief. Executive quotations, the 93% traffic decline, and the 91,000 copies are all marked as source_claim; neither company responded to requests for comment, and there is no third-party independent verification. Judgments about causation and impact in the text are explicitly marked as inferences.

Sources for this version

  1. Unsealed Documents Reveal Microsoft and OpenAI Executives Privately Called AI Training "Theft"The AI Insider

Primary report

The AI Insider

Primary source