Microsoft Staff Asked If AI Scraping Was 'Largest Theft of Labor in Human History'
Unsealed court filings in the Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft show internal concern that training AI on news articles could amount to massive labor theft and create a “doom loop” by degrading model quality. Microsoft documents described large models as products that could “destroy” their own supply chain, while Microsoft says those views came from one researcher and did not reflect company policy. Satya Nadella testified that paywalled material should be licensed, and said Microsoft would have forced retraining if it knew OpenAI used such content. OpenAI staff also discussed bypassing the Times’ paywall, and executives described AI as increasingly “substitutive” for publishers. Both companies argue their training use was fair use because it transforms material rather than replacing it.
