Court filings reveal Microsoft executive labeled AI scraping as 'theft'

Unredacted court filings in the copyright lawsuit brought by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft have revealed startling internal admissions. A top Microsoft executive privately described the companies' AI training practices as "theft," while OpenAI leadership acknowledged that their models pose an "existential threat" to publishers and journalists. The documents detail how the companies allegedly bypassed paywalls and built massive training datasets through automated scraping, while deliberately stripping copyright notices from the data. This marks a significant escalation in the three-year-old legal battle. While courts have generally been favorable toward the "fair use" defense for AI training, these new admissions may challenge that position, particularly regarding the requirement that such use should not harm the market for original work. Microsoft's own data indicates that its Copilot "answer engine" caused click-through rates for The New York Times to drop by as much as 93% compared to traditional Bing search results.