MICROSOFT EXECUTIVE CALLED AI SCRAPING THEFT, COURT FILINGS SHOW

Unredacted court filings from The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI reveal a 2023 memo by Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht. He called AI scraping "astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions" and "the largest theft of labour in human history." The filings also show OpenAI's leadership described its AI models as an "existential threat" to publishers and journalists. The New York Times filed the lawsuit in 2023, accusing both companies of using its copyrighted work without permission.

Microsoft's internal research found that its Copilot tool cut click-throughs to The New York Times by up to 93% compared with Bing. Hecht's memo introduced the idea of a "doom loop," in which AI tools undermine the content that trained them. Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said he would have required OpenAI to retrain its models without paywalled data, had he known it was being scraped. OpenAI is separately accused of removing copyright notices from material before it entered its training datasets. The lawsuit alleges those datasets included more than 91,000 pieces of work from The New York Times, the Daily News and the Centre for Investigative Reporting.

The case The New York Times brought against OpenAI and Microsoft remains open, with the wider dispute over copyrighted material in AI training unresolved. The Trump administration has filed a statement of interest backing AI developers including OpenAI, telling the court that curbing AI development under "a misunderstanding of fair use doctrine" would hinder American prosperity. The filing frames continued AI scraping as necessary for the United States to retain its position in artificial intelligence. Hecht wrote his memo in January 2023, months before The New York Times filed its lawsuit.