Human History

• The New York Times filed legal briefs in its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the companies infringed upon thousands of news articles. • A Microsoft director described AI scraping as the largest theft of labor in human history, while another memo warned that the technology creates a doom loop that hurts both model performance and the web. • These internal admissions suggest that large language models—AI systems trained on massive datasets—threaten the economic foundations of the publishers that provide their essential content.

• Internal Microsoft and OpenAI emails reveal executives feared that AI scraping would lead to a "doom loop" that could destroy news organizations. • One Microsoft executive described the process of AI scraping copyrighted content as the "largest theft of labor in human history." • This tension highlights a critical risk for the media market, where AI models rely on professional journalism while simultaneously threatening the financial viability of those publishers.

• Unsealed court filings reveal that a Microsoft executive privately described OpenAI's data scraping practices as the largest theft of labor in human history. • The documents show both companies scraped paywalled content from The New York Times to build datasets while internally warning that these actions would gut publishers. • This internal admission complicates the legal battle over whether training large language models constitutes fair use, a rule allowing copyrighted work to be used without permission for specific purposes.