Microsoft Exec Called AI Scraping History's Biggest Theft

Unredacted filings in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal stunning internal admissions. A Microsoft executive privately called AI training practices the largest theft of labor in human history, while OpenAI's leadership acknowledged its products pose an existential threat to publishers. The documents detail how companies bypassed paywalls, stripped copyright notices, and scraped millions of articles, including over 2 million documents from nytimes.com alone. Microsoft's own data shows its Copilot caused a 93% drop in click-through rates to The Times' website, undermining OpenAI's fair use legal defense.