Internal Memos Reveal Microsoft, OpenAI Executives Viewed AI Scraping as 'Theft'
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Court documents from a New York Times lawsuit expose leadership warnings that AI training creates an 'existential threat' to publishers.
Internal communications from Microsoft and OpenAI reveal that executives privately acknowledged the destructive nature of AI scraping while publicly defending it as fair use, according to reporting from Tom's Hardware and Ars Technica.
In a motion for summary judgment filed in a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by The New York Times, documents show Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht described the scraping of news for AI training as "the largest theft of labor in human history" and an "astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions." Hecht further suggested the practice made a "complete mockery" of fair use and warned of a "doom loop" where the AI product threatens the economic foundations of the content suppliers it relies upon.
Similar sentiments emerged from OpenAI. Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, described the chatbot as an "existential threat" to publishers, noting that the tools are "largely substitutive." Additionally, an OpenAI engineer stated that users would not click through to sources regardless of how prominently links are displayed.
The documents also highlight a disconnect regarding paywalls. While Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that paywalled content should be licensed and that he would have required OpenAI to retrain models if he knew paywalls were bypassed, other messages tell a different story. Ars Technica reports that when researcher Nick Ryder informed OpenAI President Greg Brockman about a "hack" to bypass The New York Times paywall, Brockman responded, "ah nice."
Microsoft data cited in the brief shows Copilot caused click-through rates for The New York Times to drop by as much as 93% compared to Bing search. News organizations argue this evidence of substitution eviscerates the fair use defense.