GoKawiilUnsealed filings show OpenAI, Microsoft executives privately doubted legality of news scraping
Newly unredacted court documents from The New York Times' copyright lawsuit reveal Microsoft's Dr. Brent Hecht warned that OpenAI's training practices resembled the 'largest theft of labor in human history,' while OpenAI's Nick Turley called it an 'existential threat to publishers.' The filings also detail how OpenAI's training pipeline bypassed paywalls and stripped copyright notices from scraped articles used to build its datasets.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
These internal admissions could undercut Microsoft and OpenAI's fair-use defense, since executives themselves seem to have recognized the ethical and legal risks of their data practices. The case is widely seen as a bellwether for whether AI firms can keep scraping copyrighted journalism without compensation, and unfavorable evidence here could ripple through similar pending lawsuits.
- Unsealed documents quote Microsoft and OpenAI executives privately criticizing their own scraping practices.
- Filings allege paywall bypassing and removal of copyright notices during dataset creation.
- The case remains pivotal in deciding whether AI training on news content qualifies as fair use.
Source: engadget.com — Steve Dent, 2026-09-18
Published there as: “Microsoft executive called OpenAI's web scraping the 'largest theft of labor in human history'”
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