Hasbro and the makers of Tetris found their intellectual property appropriated in government-produced propaganda content, prompting both companies to publicly clarify that their brands do not endorse the administration's messaging. The incidents mark a growing trend of copyright holders having to respond after official government accounts repurposed their imagery without permission.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-21
Court documents made public in an ongoing copyright lawsuit reveal internal OpenAI communications in which employees discussed the expense and legality of acquiring books to train early ChatGPT models, with some staff flagging the sourcing as questionable. The messages suggest teams weighed pirated material as a cheaper alternative to licensing content properly.
wsj.com
· 2026-09-19
Court documents in the New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, which pulled in Microsoft as OpenAI's top investor, quote Microsoft director Brent Hecht warning that AI systems are undermining the very publishers whose content trains them. CEO Satya Nadella separately acknowledged that chatbot conversations often replace visits to original source websites, cutting off traffic publishers depend on.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-19
Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group have amended their copyright lawsuit against AI music generator Suno, arguing its newly released v6 models still rely on infringing material. The labels claim Suno's own admission that v6 was trained partly on 'user interactions' with earlier models means it indirectly used previously scraped copyrighted recordings, potentially implicating over 60,000 songs.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-18
Newly unredacted court documents from copyright lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal internal comments from executives acknowledging that scraping published journalism to train chatbots amounted to theft on a massive scale. Microsoft's Brent Hecht reportedly described it as possibly 'the largest theft of labor in human history,' while an OpenAI executive warned that products like ChatGPT posed an 'existential threat' to publishers.
cnet.com
· 2026-09-18
Disney has hired Karandeep Anand, who recently led Character.AI, to serve as the company's first chief technology officer, reporting directly to CEO Josh D'Amaro. Anand will oversee enterprise technology and Disney's data and AI platforms, and is bringing several former Character.AI engineers with him. Disney is also promoting Adam Smith to a new Chairman of Direct-to-Consumer role for Disney Entertainment.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-18
Newly unsealed portions of a legal brief in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft show internal admissions from both companies' executives. Microsoft's director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, reportedly called AI training data scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history,' while OpenAI's Head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, described the chatbot as an 'existential threat' to publishers. The filing also cites data showing Copilot slashed click-through traffic to the Times by up to 93% compared to Bing search.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-18
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.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-18
Newly unsealed documents in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal internal remarks from Microsoft's Brent Hecht, who predicted the public would eventually see large language model training as unprecedented theft of labor. The filing also cites OpenAI's Greg Brockman acknowledging that ChatGPT can reproduce and complete sentences from NYT articles verbatim.
techspot.com
· 2026-09-18
A newly unsealed filing in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveals internal communications showing employees at both companies recognized their AI tools could jeopardize the publishers whose content trains them. The filing suggests executives were aware of this risk even as they continued developing and deploying the technology.
wsj.com
· 2026-09-17
Newly unsealed court documents from The New York Times-led copyright lawsuit reveal internal Microsoft and OpenAI communications acknowledging the risks of scraping news content for AI training. Microsoft's Brent Hecht reportedly called the practice possibly the 'largest theft of labor in human history' and undermined the companies' own fair-use defense, while OpenAI's Nick Turley warned that AI products could pose an 'existential threat' to publishers.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-09-17
Newly unredacted court documents in The New York Times' copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal that a senior Microsoft executive privately labeled the companies' AI training practices as theft, while OpenAI leaders reportedly acknowledged their models posed an existential threat to publishers. The filings also allege the companies bypassed paywalls, scraped content en masse, and removed copyright notices to build training datasets.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-17