Microsoft Exec Called AI Scraping 'the Largest Theft of Labor in Human History'

Newly unredacted court filings in The New York Times copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal that a top Microsoft executive privately described the companies' AI training practices as theft, calling AI scraping "the largest theft of labor in human history." The material was unsealed this week, three years into the case, and it has quickly become the most-discussed AI story of the day.

According to the filings, OpenAI's own leadership warned internally that its models posed an existential threat to the publishers and journalists whose work trained them. The documents also allege the companies obtained content by bypassing paywalls undetected, building training datasets through mass scraping, and deliberately stripping copyright notices from the data.

Much of the new information comes from The Times' own brief rather than the underlying exhibits, which remain sealed, and the quotes are presented without their original context. Whether AI firms can legally train on copyrighted material still has no clear answer, though judges have generally favored the industry's fair use arguments and the Trump administration filed a brief supporting that view earlier this month. The filing is the latest escalation in a case that will shape how AI companies source their training data.